


Displacement Theory (and all that's in between)

by anamatics



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, F/F, Gen, star crossed lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-25
Updated: 2015-08-17
Packaged: 2017-12-06 11:49:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 37
Words: 33,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/735301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anamatics/pseuds/anamatics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She didn't always understand why it happened, only that it did. She was a traveler across the span of a lifetime that was probably not her own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Myka is 7 and 31, Helena is 35

Helena Wells has not woken up to the sounds of a crying child in over one hundred years.  She does so begrudgingly and sleepily, watching as Myka shifts in the bed beside her and turns onto her back.  Her skin is pale and beautiful in the moonlight.  Helena can feel her breath catch as she pauses to stare at the woman she’s come to love despite all the odds and improbabilities of her very existence. 

She’s never really truly felt love before, she knows this.  Myka Bering is the one person she thinks she could truly ever love.  
  
It is mid-summer, but the nights in South Dakota are still cool.  The sounds of peeping frogs and of crickets fill the silent Bed and Breakfast and Helena finds her quarry sitting on the couch in the living room looking scared and alone.  She’s shivering, naked as the day she was born.  
  
“You’re a bit out of time,” she says with a smile - knowing that this will not be the last time she meets this girl, nor is it the first.  
  
The girl looks up at her with tear-stained cheeks that remind Helena far too much of Christina for a moment.  She bites at her lips and gathers the child up, holding her close, covering her nakedness and her fear with a love that she can never quite put into words.  
  
“When…”  the girl asks, and Helena knows that this is not her first trip.  That’s good.  She’s met this girl once before, when they were both far younger and she remembers how scared that little girl was, displacing for the first time in her life.  Out of time and far too young to understand what that even meant.   
  
“You are thirty-one,” Helena whispers as the girl stares up at her.  Her eyes are wide and curious and Helena wants to tell her all about the adventures of the day, but holds her tongue.  Some things have to be discovered in due course.  “And dead tired because you worked hard all day.”  
  
“What do I do?”  She’s tried this tactic before, and Helena knows better.  Myka’s told her what to say; but Helena’s always known.  She can spurn the advances of a teenager after all, and a twenty-something, and an innocent nine-year-old’s kiss.  She likes to boast that out of the two of them, she is the more mature.  
  
“You are a very brave woman who saves the day and solves puzzles,” Helena whispers, pulling a blanket around the pair of them.  “I know that this probably won’t be a long trip, so why don’t you stay with me and get some rest.”  
  
“It’s the middle of the day,” the girl protests.  “I was in science class.”  
  
But then, just as suddenly as Helena opens her mouth to respond with a wise retort of her own, the girl is gone.   
  
Helena sits for a while in the moonlight, blanket still slung over her shoulders, a hollow void where the girl once was. She’s lost in thought, in memory.  This girl has appeared across the span of her waking memories in this century, and in a few that she probably should not remember from her time in the Bronze.  
  
“How old was I?”  Myka’s leaning against the door frame, her hair a curly riot and her lips just barely hinting at a smile.   
  
“No more than eight.”  Helena runs a hand through her hair and stands, folding the blanket as she does so.  She lays it back over the arm of the couch and turns, “You mentioned something about science class.”  
  
Myka’s face turns and she grimaces, “Ugh, that one was awful.  I missed the baby squid dissection and my father was furious with me for it.”  
  
“You can’t help your mutation,” Helena supplies.  
  
Myka grins.   
  
“Funny,” she laughs, “You always say that.”


	2. Myka is 5

When it first happens, Myka is five years old.  She is sitting on the edge of her bed, reading Dr. Seuss out loud to herself when she finds herself suddenly a million miles away and in a room full of statues.  Normally, she’d chalk this up to a daydream (as her father calls them), but she wasn’t reading about Zeus or Odysseus so she’s not entirely sure what’s happened. 

She’s cold.  The floor here is concrete and frozen beneath bare feet, and she shivers as she stares up at the high arching ceiling and the faces of what she can only imagine are heroes, faces trapped forever in shiny brown metal.  She reaches out, her fingers touching knee of one, drawing back when she finds that it is warm, only to touch another.  
  
She is so taken by these faces that she forgets - just for a moment - that she’s naked and alone.  She doesn’t know where this place is, and she thinks that she might be dreaming. 

She’s not stupid though - and she knows that there’s a reason her father’s been taking her to a strange doctor since she was three. She wonders (because Myka is very bright) if maybe this has something to do with the doctor and her menacing smile and hair that looks like a beehive.    
  
“You look cold,” a man’s voice says, leaning just out of the shadow of a doorway that Myka hadn’t noticed before now to offer her a blanket.  He is old and wizened and has eyebrows that almost scare Myka, except for the fact that he has grey hair and looks sort of like her grandpa.  “And a little lost.”  
  
Myka takes the blanket with clumsy and childish fingers and pulls it around herself.  It is warm and smells of old people and Myka wrinkles her nose at it.  She’s grateful for the warmth, though, because it is so cold in this place.  “I don’t know how I got here,” she says, her voice a little shaky and squeaky.  She’s only five, she doesn’t know if it’s okay to be naked around strangers any more; or to even talk about them.  Stranger Danger, the TV says.    
  
She doesn’t even know where her clothes went.    
  
“I saw a report of an intruder, so I came down to check,” he smiles at her and she grins at him.  “You’re not very menacing, though.”  He trails off, looking at her, “And this isn’t the first time I’ve caught you in here.”  
  
“I’ve never-” Myka begins, but he silences her with his eyebrows.    
  
“All will be explained in time,” he says, tousling her hair and sitting down next to her.   
  
When she vanishes and finds herself back in her bed with her clothes in a pile on the floor, Myka decides that she must have gotten tired and fallen asleep.  That’s the only way she could come up with such fantastic things.  It doesn’t explain why her clothes are off, but Myka’s done that before, she’s sure of it.  She puts her clothes on hurriedly and picks up her book.    
  
Her mother calls and says that dinner’s ready, which is strange, because fifteen minutes ago, she was told to wash her hands and in that time, she was somewhere else.  
  
Myka decides that she has crazy cool dreams and shrugs it off.


	3. Myka is 30, Helena is 34

At first, when Myka Bering comes to work at the Warehouse, they tell her that her mutation is treatable.  Dr. Calder is there with pills and a syringe every month and Myka experiences more freedom than she’s ever had in her life up to this point.  It’s freeing, liberating, she could maybe pretend that she’s just a little bit normal.

Dr. Calder’s medicine takes the displacement down to a level that Myka can barely register ever remembering and she finds that she almost misses disappearing off to another time.  She misses herself, older, kinder, understanding.  She misses the woman who’s always there, no matter when she goes.  She misses her room full of statues and that kind and sad face she finds herself sitting next to and talking to for hours when she gets stuck in that room, afraid to move for fear that she’ll see the man with the eyebrows again.  
  
(Who is now her boss, funny how these things happen.)  
  
She’s supposed to tell them of her trips.  They say it’s because she’s got some sort of genetic mutation on human DNA that they’ve yet to see.  Most of them - the people like her - have minor abilities.  They get feelings about things or may have simple telekinesis.  Stuff that Myka’s always been a little bit inclined to believe in because she feels like she’s spent half her life in some other time.  
  
Now though, she finds herself firmly entrenched in the present.  The Warehouse is grounding her, keeping her in the now, in this moment.  
  
This horrible, god-awful moment.  
  
They’re running for their lives, MacPherson’s gone and done something horrible and they don’t know anything about his plan and what he intends to do until they see the explosion in the umbilicus.  Myka can feel the blood drain from her face as she watches this old kind man who had been so kind to her once upon a time, vanish in a ball of fiery death.    
  
Artie’s dead and Myka knows that he  _can’t_  be dead because she was just talking with him three years from now last week.  She fights down the panic that rises in her stomach, that she may have finally broken the timeline.  Her hand is clapped over her mouth and she’s breathing deeply, terrified of what she might say to Pete.  He cannot know just how often this happens.  He likes to think of her like he does Hiro from that TV show  _Heroes_  he likes so much.    
  
In reality it is not that simple.  She’s always worried, even obsessed with the future and how she has not been to the past in a very long time.  Her life, Dr. Calder hypothesizes, is focused more on the present and the future than what happened during her childhood now.  She’s had her big trips to the past, all when she was too young to really understand, always to the same little girl with the dark eyes and curls.  
  
Myka is shaking, her entire body convulsing at the idea that  _it cannot be true_ , that Artie is gone but that he will live somehow.  it is meant to be.  There’s smoke and fire and she’s stepping forward to it, a smile growing on her lips as Artie’s voice intones, “So that’s how that works.”  MacPherson, somehow, slipped him the Phoenix, the resurection artifact.  Everything is going to be okay.  
  
But it’s not.  Myka remembers her last trip forward, standing in the rubble of an explosion, peering around at the destruction.  The woman from the future, the one who’s always there, is standing amidst the chaos.  She is serenely beautiful, and Myka goes to her as she’s been going all her life, flinging herself into the woman’s arms and sobbing.  “Next time you see me,” The woman in the future says, leaning in and pressing her lips to the curve of Myka’s jaw, “I won’t know you to be you.”  
  
Thing is, when Myka started working at the Warehouse, her trips to the past all but stopped.  She’s been back once, to see herself at age nine, struggling to understand a trip that Myka remembers well.  Victorian England, a little girl named Christina.  It doesn’t make sense to Myka even now, but when she displaces next it’s to the future, five years down the line, and she walks in on herself having sex with another woman.  The same woman as always.  
  
A major life event, she laughs at herself, and turns away.  She doesn’t want to intrude.  
  
They go to London and Myka finds herself pondering that trip, wondering why it doesn’t shock her.  She’s been told that her trips revolve around juncture points in her life story.  The first time her father hit her she ends up so far in the future that her head spun at the thought that she saved the day and solved puzzles for a living.  She’s still not quite sure what that means, but her mind remembered Leena’s upon her first inspection of the Bed and Breakfast and Myka smiles as Leena asks if she’s been there before.  
  
“A few times,” Leena confesses.  “Usually in the middle of the night.”  
  
They share a private smile then and Myka knows that she’ll probably be seeing herself at some point soon.  The displacement is unpredictable, but she’s not even mad at Mrs. Frederic or at Pete any more for landing her in South Dakota.  It was how her future has always played out, even if she had ambitions to greater things in Washington.    
  
Myka displaces more around Life and death, her grandfather’s funeral, commencement at college, Tracy’s death, her first kiss.  Sam’s death…  
  
God, Sam.  Sam was the only one that she’d ever told about her displacement before she came to work for the Warehouse.  Now everyone knows and the feeling is liberating when she reappears and Pete is there holding out her clothes with his back turned.  “When did you go?” he always asks, and Myka just shakes her head.  She wishes that she knew, and when she does, she usually doesn’t tell Pete because she hates knowing the future.    
  
It feels like cheating.  
  
MacPherson debronzed H.G. Wells and Myka’s chewing moodily on the back of her when trying to shake the feeling of deja vu.  She’s done all this before, and her stomach turns.  She cannot leave, not now.    
  
“Stay with us,” Pete says, squeezing her hand and Myka nods her head.  
  
 _Next time you see me, I won’t know you…_  
  
They make a spectacle of themselves at the H.G. Wells historic house and Myka bites her lip and cuts back a laugh as Pete violently demoustaches the impersonator.  It’s funny, in a way.  Pete is like an overgrown child, but Myka likes him all the same.  He’s funny and laughs a lot and he gets Myka to laugh too.  
  
She’s met him a few times, far in the future, when there’s a pin at his lapel and he seems somehow sadder than he is now.  She always means to ask him, but never quite finds the words.  Instead he hands her clothes and she puts them on and that is how it is.  He’ll sit her down with a book or a crossword and she pretends to not notice how tired he looks all the time.  He’s her best friend, he should be able to talk to her.  
  
And then suddenly the pieces are falling into place far more quickly than Myka could have ever realized and she’s face to face with the woman from her room of statues, holding a gun at her head. The last time she saw this woman living and breathing the moment was only fleeting, and she was nine years old.  
  
This is not the first impression that Myka had wanted to make, but the woman smiles, eyes dark and intriguing.    
  
Myka smiles at her, just a little, and she can see the other woman grin right back.


	4. Myka is 9, Helena is 30

She’s glad that this trip takes place in the middle of the night; or at least begins there.  She has felt it coming all day.  It’s a kind of nervous energy that makes her leg twitch and drives Myka to spend hours practicing her fencing footwork.  Back and forth she moves, across the narrow space between the bookstore and the building next to it.  She doesn’t even have her foil, no need for it.  She is a bundle of energy that cannot be tamed and she’s struggling to keep herself anchored in the here and the now.

She has to move, has to do  _something_.  Her body will start to fade and then she’ll be gone if she doesn’t.  Her father thought that fencing might tire her out some, slow the process to a simple crawl, but Myka’s moving back and forth in time more and more now.  Her father hits her when she disappears at times that are inopportune (like she can control them), and when she reappears, naked and alone and has to sneak back to the house.  He hates that she isn’t normal.  
  
The words are on her lips when her mother comes in to turn off the bedroom light at ten o’clock.  Myka is putting away  _The Fellowship of the Ring_  when she catches her mother staring at her.  She’s not fully there, she realizes, and turns sad eyes towards the woman who never stops her father.    
  
Myka sometimes wonders if her mother loves her.  Or if the sickness that Myka has has made her so impossible to love that she’s going to be alone forever.  
  
There’s always the woman in her future. The one with the sad brown eyes and the loving smile.  The one who always hugs Myka a little too close and tells her the most amazing stories when she finds herself lost in time.  Myka wants her mother to be more like  _that_ , instead of simply ignoring Myka in favor of Tracy.  
  
Tracy is the favorite.  Always has been, since the day she was born and Myka ended up in the room full of statues.  
  
She doesn’t say anything to her mother about how this one is going to be a bad one.  She’s learned to recognize the signs now.  She’s nine, she can handle it herself.  
  
Her stomach aches and when she curls in bed, her head swimming, Myka is grateful that she’s able to at least pretend to be normal.  She’s just sick, for a fleeting moment.    
  
It happens as she blinks her eyes, lashes fluttering shut before they snap open again and she’s so cold and she hates this so much.    
  
It’s daytime when she is and she shivers despite herself.  The day is warm, but her clothes are gone and she’s outside.  Myka gulps, like she sees the kids in the movies do, and looks around herself.  It has to be an alleyway.  They have one next to the bookstore where Myka likes to play play pirates and practice her fencing.  This one is wider, there are doors and people walking by.  No one glances at her and she realizes that it’s because there’s a hand pulling her behind a heap of garbage.  She wants to scream, but the shout dies in her throat.  There are tight and serious fingers - small fingers, a girl her own age - that are drawing her into the shadows where she cannot be seen.  
  
The girl stares at her with dark eyes that almost remind Myka of the woman from the future, despite the fact that she knows that this is the past.  “Why are you naked?” the girl demands, pulling off her jacket and throwing it at Myka.  She speaks with an accent that Myka has only ever heard on television, and her dress indicates that Myka has ventured far outside of her current lifespan.  She looks like someone out of masterpiece theatre, and Myka is grateful that the girl isn’t running away from her.    
  
She’s so far in the past that Myka thinks that telling the truth won’t hurt.  “I have a disease,” she explains, tugging the jacket over her shoulders and sighing happily when she finds herself wrapped in it’s warmth.  It’s long enough to be a dress, and Myka’s glad.  Usually she ends up stealing clothes or just  _hiding_  until someone finds her. This time, it might be different.   This time she isn’t afraid to tell the truth, and somehow that makes her feel brave.   “It makes me move through time.”  she screws up her face and sighs as dramatically as she can, “I hate it because I can’t control it.”  
  
But Myka isn’t brave.  Every time this happens she wants to curl up and die.  She’s getting used to it, getting used to going to the doctor with her wicked smile and the shots that don’t do anything.  Myka feels like she’s spent half her life in a hospital and the other half not even in her own time.  She’s nine years old and she has no friends because they think she’s too smart, too weird.  Even in fencing class, they stay away from her.  
  
Myka beats them all.  It’s what she has to do to be the best.    
  
The girl’s eyes widen and Myka has a terrifying moment when she remembers how her father once let her stay up and watch  _Monty Python’s Holy Grail_  and how their eyes had gone all wide right before they started shouting ‘A Witch! Burn her!’  Myka doesn’t want to be burned.  It sounds painful.  
  
The hand that had clasped her own and then had hurried let go is back on Myka’s.  She’s greeted with an excited smile when Myka dares look up through her curls to see this girl trying desperately to hide her delighted look and not really succeeding.  “Uncle Charles writes tales like that!”  the girl says excitedly, “You must meet him and mummy.”  She’s got Myka by the hand, dragging her across the alleyway and into a crowded street.  Myka blinks for a moment, taking in the scene before her, before the girl is pulling her up the road and around the back of a house.    
  
The street is tightly packed with carts and people.  There are women walking about with parasols and the whole thing looks like it’s out of the Vick-Tor-ian (Myka still has trouble with that word) time period.  So before there are cars, but definitely after there are horses.  It smells bad, like soot and smoke and poo.  Myka wrinkles her nose and steps around a questionable puddle, her bare feet unused to the hard-packed earth and cobblestones beneath her toes.    
  
The house is modest, there’s a fence that they don’t go through, instead cutting around another alleyway and into the back of the building, where the girl finally slows down enough for Myka to get her bearings.    
  
“What’s your name?”  Myka finally works up the courage to ask.  She’s trying not to sound terrified, because she’s never been this far back before.  This can’t be a major life event - not of her’s.    
  
The doctors say that she probably has three or four trips like this in her.  Big trips where she goes someplace outside of her own timeline.  She’s sad that she can’t control it, but seeing what has to be England what has to be one hundred years ago is probably worth it.  
  
The displacement has made her far more practical than most nine-year-olds.    
  
“Christina,” the girl says with a smile. She’s in a white dress and looks like the first girl that Myka has ever actually  _wanted_  to be friends with.  She’s not used to it, but when the smile is easy and Christina’s hand is warm in her own, Myka just lets the question come, “What’s your’s?”  
  
Myka wonders if she should lie, she’s so far back in time that it probably won’t matter, but she’s always had a name she always gives when she’s not sure.  It’s safer that way.  They don’t call her parents, or her husband - she thinks it’s a husband anyway - and so far it’s worked out.  “Anita,” she says quietly.  “Anita Jones.”  
  
Christina’s eyes are piercing and really don’t believe her and Myka can’t help but hang her head a little bit in shame as Christina doesn’t say anything at all.  She just turns and knocks on the door and lets the woman who answers it wearing servant’s clothes tut at her and her dirty dress.    
  
“Who’s your friend, miss?”  the servant asks.  She speaks differently from Christina.  Her accent seems harder, rougher.  Myka isn’t sure she likes it.  
  
“That’s Anita,” Christina explains.  Myka is really impressed, for someone who can’t be much older than Tracy, Christina is really amazing at lying and bossing people around.  She supposes that growing up with servants (instead of being expected to be them for her parents) must have something to do with that.  Watching Christina, Myka resolves to find a way to earn a lot of money solving puzzles and saving the day in the future, so she can have a servant to boss around.    
  
“Someone stole her clothes, so I told her I’d loan her one of mine.”  Christina’s eyebrow dares a challenge, but the maid says nothing and merely nods her head.  Myka opens her mouth to point out that that’s really not what happened, but the maid just takes Christina at her word and disappears leaving the two of them alone at the back steps of the house.  Christina seems to approve of this vanishing act and drags Myka up the stairs and into a bedroom.    
  
It is very old fashioned.    
  
Okay that’s not entirely true.  The bed frame is made out of metal and Christina jumps up and over it and it makes a loud squeaking noise that Myka is sure would drive her crazy  if she had to sleep on it for even one night.  She bites her lip and hopes it’s not a multi-day adventure as Christina makes her way over to the wardrobe that dominates the entire room.  Myka wonders if it leads to Narnia.    
  
Because Peter and Lucy and them were English, and Christina clearly is too.  
  
“Thing is,” Myka tries to explain as Christina rummages for a dress-thing… or something.  Myka has no idea what the garments that are being thrown on the bed even  _are_.  She’s used to jeans and a t-shirt.  Maybe a flannel shirt on top of it.  It’s 1989, not that big a deal.  
  
This is 18-something.  She hopes they won’t make her wear a corset.  She’s read about them in her mother’s books on feminism.  They sound awful.    
  
 ”I’ll just disappear in a little while anyway… you don’t have to go nuts or anything.”  
  
“Go nuts?”  Christina can’t be more than seven, Myka knows what it’s like talking to Tracy (more and more annoying these days) but she’s forgetting that this isn’t last year or even five years ago, that this is well over a hundred years ago and there’s no way that an English person would know what that meant.    
  
“Uh…” she begins, biting at her lip and frowning.  She doesn’t know what to say, how to explain it in such a way that it would make sense.  “Just don’t uh… If you’ve just got a nightgown or something easy.”    
  
Christina, Myka will later swear, looks a little bit upset that she can’t play dress up using Myka as an over-sized Barbie.  If they even had Barbies in this day and age, and she’s  _pretty sure_  that they didn’t.    
  
They find a nightgown that looks a bit more like a dress than pajamas and Myka pulls it over her head and grins at Christina who grins right back.  “Do you end up in different times often?”  She asks, eyes wide and curious, “Does it hurt?”  
  
Myka shakes her head.  “It just makes me feel sick and I have to go to a place where people won’t see me disappear,” she explains.  “My dad says that I leave piles of clothes around when I vanish.”  
  
Realization dawns in Christina’s eyes and she nods knowingly.  “That’s why you didn’t have any clothes!”  she’s delighted and Myka’s glad for that.  
  
She had no idea  _why_  she’s here, in this particular moment in time.  The big trips, the doctors said, would always have meaning.  She doesn’t think that sitting on Christina’s bed in 18-whatever was really what they meant.    
  
“Where is your mom?”  Myka asks, looking around Christina’s room for a picture - painted or maybe a photograph?  Did they have them back then… she can’t remember.    
  
Christina shrugs, “She’ll be back soon.”  Her eyes narrow conspiratorially, “She was at the observatory, looking at a star chart.”  
  
Myka opens up her mouth to reply, but there’s the sounds of footsteps hastening up the stairs and Christina’s jumped off the bed and is bounding towards the door shouting for her mother.  Myka gets off the bed slowly, not wanting to be rude.  She lingers in the doorway for a minute before turning around it, watching Christina bounce on the balls of her (really uncomfortable-looking) shoes.    
  
The woman at the top of the stairs is tall and has kind eyes.  Brown eyes.  Myka’s mouth drops open and the woman is there again -   _younger_. Less sad looking somehow.  
  
She wants to say something.  The words are there.  She tries to say them but they’re caught, welling up in her throat as she feels herself vanish once again in the blink of an eye.  
  
It’s ten thirty on a Saturday in her bedroom when Myka opens her eyes again.  She throws her head back on the pillow and grins.  “Wicked,” she says.


	5. Myka is 12 and 30, Helena is 34

“You’d think that I’d get over meeting you at all ages when you come here,” Helena comments dryly to Myka as she sits her younger self down on the couch in Leena’s living room.  It’s still so strange, so completely and utterly jarring.  Helena had never even heard tell of temporal displacement before she met Myka, and she certainly had never thought that such a genetic mutation would ever come to exist within the human species.

She’s done a lot of research, since waking up over a hundred years after when she expected to die.  She’s read about genetics, cloning, the sequencing of the human genome and she is in awe at all mankind has accomplished.  Nothing is more of a marvel than Myka Bering.  She is a genetic miracle, DNA sequenced in such away that her body displaces across time effortlessly.    
  
Myka always reminds her that she’s without clothes when she reappears, and Helena decides that even naked at twelve, Myka is a marvel unrivaled to any of the many that she’s seen in the 21st century.    
  
She hates this place; hates the cruelty of the people, hates the way that they kill each other so effortlessly.  Myka carries a gun and a Tesla, but she’s still inclined to reach for the gun.  The gun that has no place in what was supposed to be the future.  
  
Helena’s vision of the future did not involve them.  
  
She bites her lip and tries not to look at the child.  
  
(She can’t help herself.)  
  
Helena’s sitting on the edge of the couch, twirling a lock of black hair around her finger as she stared at the small, slight form of Myka at twelve.  She’s a rather awkward child, all knees and elbows and far too many curls.  In another life, Helena guesses that Myka would have been a good companion for Christina.  They’ve got those same inquisitive eyes and the same smile full of childish insanity.    
  
Myka just shrugs at her and gestures towards the door.  “I’m gunna go get a shirt,” she explains.  Helena doesn’t know why she’s always being left alone with this little girl that will grow up to be Myka Bering.  Helena tries to assume that this is just another aspect of the passing flirtation between the pair of them.  The one that comes easy to her lips and draws coy smiles out of Helena when she’s not paying attention.

She doesn’t know what to do with all this information.  It doesn’t fit into her plan.    
  
“You’re different than you usually are,” Little Myka says.  She’s got her hands propping up her chin, elbows on her knees.  She looks so adorably childish in her slightly dated (if images of children of today are anything to go by) hair cut.  The blanket that’s slung loosely over her shoulders reveals pale skin unmarred as Myka’s is now with scars from a life that she has yet to live.  
  
Helena feels her breath catch in her throat.  She’s met Myka at seven and at five, but she can’t stomach this older, slightly more aware version of her friend.  This child can see things in her that Helena would rather stay hidden, buried deep underneath her facade of sanity.    
  
It’s all very disorientating.  
  
Helena shrugs, “I haven’t the slightest idea what you mean.”  
  
This Myka, all of twelve and naked as the day she was born just rolls her eyes at Helena.  “You’re usually so cool, but there’s just… something…”  
  
Myka comes back in with a shirt and Helena’s retort dies on her lips. 


	6. Myka is 30, Helena is 34

Her jaw is set into a hard line, eyes narrowed in a pain that comes not from external wound, but rather internal.  Helena…

The betrayal cut so deeply that Myka could scarcely find the words, let alone the resolve, to push herself further than she’d ever pushed before.  She’s grounded in the here and the now.  Her hands are shaking, there’s a gun pressed to her head.  She could just leave - she’s got enough control left to embrace the fluttering in her stomach that has nothing to do with the displacement.  This is in the moment, this is here.  
  
Myka bites her lip and doesn’t let her hands shake any more.    
  
“Do it,” she’s goading, trying to dare Helena into action when Helena is so obviously torn.  There is more to this, Myka knows this, but she cannot say anything.  She has to let this play out.  It doesn’t end here.  
  
It didn’t start here, and it won’t end here.  
  
She doesn’t remember what she says afterwards, but Helena can’t do it.  Myka was right.  She relishes her victory as Helena sobs into her hand and Myka makes no move to comfort her.  It’s crazy, she cant’s stand it. 

Maybe she’s no better than the rest of them, trapped in her own bullshit.  She hates the moment, but lives in it until someone’s there, pulling her away.  Helena’s in custody, things are safe.

Myka shaking, as Artie pulls her into a tight hug.  He’s hurt, but the EMTs’ve patched him up admirably.

“You shouldn’t have…” He begins.

“Don’t.” Myka cuts him off. 

Finally, it’s all said and done, and Myka lets herself vanish.


	7. Myka is 30 and 15

“Why are you crying?”    
  
She’s crying because everything hurts.  Everything is complicated and she can’t stand herself for caving the way that she did.  She had honestly wanted to die.  Had wanted Helena to pull that trigger.  She’s never seen the future this clearly, and she knew that it would not be the same without Helena there right beside her.    
  
Everything was laid out so perfectly, so completely and utterly perfectly, that Myka bits her lip and doesn’t look away when her fifteen-year-old self hands her a blanket and a pair of her father’s sweatpants.    
  
“A lot of reasons,” she says.  Her voice is shaking, fearful in the growing night.    
  
She’s fifteen, way too young to be understanding.  She remembers this hug, this desperate embrace as she finds herself sobbing heavily into her own hair.  She’s still so short, so gangly and awkward.  
  
“You can’t tell me,” Myka whispers to herself.  “And I wouldn’t tell you.”  
  
The laugh that escapes Myka’s lips is harsh, biting.  She’s angry, oh so angry at this version of herself who doesn’t have a care in the world beyond failing her next biology exam (she doesn’t).  She can’t stand this, it’s too much, too hard after what Helena did.    
  
That’s just it.  What, exactly, did Helena do?  Myka bites her tongue and stares off into space for a moment before nodding her agreement.  “You’re far too young for this sort of thing, anyway.”  
  
“I’m fifteen!”  She protests, pouting in that way that Myka recalls Pete saying was utterly unfair on several occasions. 

She’s lying to herself when she thinks that this will all make sense in due time.  It won’t.  Probably not ever.  Helena’s perfectly executed plan and the bittersweet feeling of seeing herself so completely care free is almost too much.  She bites back a sob and shakes her head violently to clear it.  She can do this.  She willdo this.   
  
Myka pats herself on the head.  “Old enough to know that you’re fighting a losing battle there sweetheart.”  
  
The glare that greets her as the world spins and vanishes is fantastic.


	8. Myka is 30

She quits the Warehouse when she finds out that they’ve taken Helena away from her.  She can’t stand the idea of that.  She turns and walks away from the place that the future always leads her towards and where the past pointed her to.  She’s been young and old in this building, watched herself grow up time and time again.  This is the place with the room full of statues with kind faces, where Myka first felt truly at home. 

 

Mr. Kosan listens to Myka’s desperate pleas, watching as she runs her hands through her hair.  The nervous habit claims her as her thoughts run a mile a minute.  Her reasoning is flawed, she knows it.  She has to say it anyway, because she cannot admit that she’s in love with the woman they’re hauling away in chains.  To admit it would be to admit an attraction she’s clung to since she was fifteen.  She’s not sure she’s ready for it.

 

His hand is strong on her shoulder as he promises her that they won’t bronze H.G. Wells again.  ”To do so would be inhumane to her already addled mind.”

 

She’s not addled, Myka wants to protest, but the words are already dead in her throat.  Helena is anything but addled, her mind is far too shrewd to allow herself to be caught in a situation without a plan.  And yet, it seems as though she’d never anticipated this. 

 

It occurs to Myka that Helena had never intended to live past that moment.

 

She’s seen the future - her own future - Helena is in it, everything is okay.  

 

But she cannot, she cannot let it go.  She has to go.  She’s always run away from her problems, she’s so afraid it happening again.  She, not Helena who did not commit the act; no she, Myka Bering, had trusted the wrong person and had nearly lost the world.  

 

The guilt consumes her, every time she sees Pete and Claudia she wants to curl around herself and sob until she disappears.  Displacing through time would be preferable to this feeling of overpowering guilt.  

 

She says her goodbyes and rides off into the sunset, hero from an old western.  She’s not Clint Eastwood, though.  She’s just a girl who’s running away from everything she’s ever known and loved.

 

Myka drives in small increments, the entire six hundred miles back home to Colorado Springs.  Her mother greets her at the door as she stumbles out of the car, holding her tightly and scolding her for driving that far.  She’s left the Warehouse and Dr. Calder’s pills.  There’s no telling what may happen to her now.  She clings to her mother’s shirt and tries to ignore her phone buzzing in her pocket. 

 

They’ll keep calling until she tells them why - but she cannot.  

 

The words die in her throat every time.  There’re no secrets in her house.  Her father is a stoic man whose intellect makes him unattainable to most.  He pushes Myka harder than ever now.  Tracy is gone, left as soon as she could get away.  Myka, trapped by her disease as she was, stayed.  Now she is all that remains of their once strong family.  

 

“You’re a fool for running away,” he says, before disappearing into the back of the book store.  Her fists are clenched at her sides, shaking slightly as she bites back three decades worth of retorts she thinks of just too late.

 

She cannot help the fact that she’s like this.

 

She cannot help a lot of things.

 

The future isn’t set in stone, anyway.

 

Helena is gone, there’s no point in anything now. 


	9. Myka is 30, Helena is 9

As easy as it is to walk into someone’s life, it is just as easy to disappear out of it.  Myka sits, minding her father’s shop and staring listlessly out the window at the side street of Colorado Springs where there is very little foot traffic on a good day. Bering and Sons (never daughters) gets decent patronage, and the little old ladies that Myka scarcely remembers from church as a child stream in steadily to check on her.  They don’t know about her illness, about the displacement, about why she’s so damn sad, but they break up the long hours of deafening silence.  

 

Truth be told, Myka is worried.  She hasn’t traveled anywhere in nearly two weeks and that is unusual, even by post-Warehouse standards.  Pete has stopped calling, which cuts down on her stress somewhat.  She cannot face him and tell him that she nearly killed him.  That she trusted someone who was so broken that she wanted to kill herself - kill them all.

Helena couldn’t kill Myka though, letting her slip backwards fifteen years to a place where everything had been far simpler.

Myka recalls what it was like before Dr. Calder’s pills.  She doesn’t know how long she’ll have before they completely leave her system and the displacement starts to be like it was before that time.  They’re obviously not entirely legal, and she’s okay with that.  They’ve helped so much that she’s almost tempted to contact Mrs. Frederic somehow and ask for time, but to stay on the pills.  She can’t be displacing and seeing Helena, the very timeline may hang in the balance. 

 

She’s afraid, so completely and utterly afraid of what might happen if she vanishes.

 

The timeline itself would be in jeopardy, she thinks, for she will do anything in her power to save Helena Wells from herself, even if that means throwing away the future that she’s come to long for.

 

She spends twenty minutes speaking to Ethel Blythe, her fifth grade teacher, extolling anecdotes that are most certainly not true about her time as a secret service agent.  She’s just Myka now, and Mrs. Blythe’s smile is far from judgmental. She must have heard about Sam, which makes the whole situation and conversation so much more awkward.   

She really has experienced more loss than most.

Mrs. Blythe is just leaving when Myka feels it start.  The room is spinning and she grabs at the counter, her hand is slowly growing translucent, her stomach is churning.  And just as suddenly as it starts, it stops.  

 

She isn’t used to feeling that much of the journey.  

 

Rolling over, Myka vomits into the tall grass she’s sitting on.  It is overcast, but warm.  She has no idea when she is, or even where. This place holds no meaning to her at all, familiar as it is.  Her face pulls downwards into a frown as she spits a few times to get the taste of bile out of her mouth.  This has happened before, once or twice, ending up in a place like this.  An empty field in an overcast summer.  As though her body is trying again and again to get something right, and it never quite works out.

 

Myka doesn’t dare stand.  This area seems fairly rural, which only serves to complicate things more.  Rural means alone, which means more likely to encounter men, alone.  She’s been in close calls before, naked and completely helpless.  She’d started taking fencing lessons, self-defense.  She never told her father about the man with the bad breath and yellow teeth that got too close for comfort.

 

She leans back and turns her gaze towards the sky.  A kite drifts lazily across the sky.  Unlike the other times that Myka has been to this field, it is a new development, and she watches it with some interest.  The construction is of paper and twigs, unlike what she’s used to in her own day and age, when everything is lightweight plastic.  She bites at her lip, and wonders if she’s gone further back in time that she’s ever possibly imagined.

 

“Why are you naked?” a young voice asks with an accent that Myka could place anywhere.  She does not want to place it as British and middle class, however. She’s afraid of what might happen if she goes too far down that rabbit hole.

 

She knows that she will be seeing Helena again, but this is too much.  Her breath catches and curls her knees up to herself, squeezing her eyes shut and refusing to open them.  If she cannot see this girl who could be Helena, then she isn’t really there.  Myka will disappear in a few moment’s time and this will be but a bitter memory.

 

A childish finger pokes her cheek, once, and then again when Myka does not open her eyes.  Myka’s lips pitch downwards into a scowl and she mutters, “Rude.”

 

There is a shriek of childish laughter and Myka opens her eyes to a very young face with the same kind and intelligent brown eyes she’s always come to associate with the displacement.  ”Sorry,” the girl giggles as Myka folds her arms across her chest and glares.  She’s smiling though, to let this girl-who-is-most-certainly-Helena see that she’s not serious.  Her child-like fist is clenched tightly around a second kite, her face is smudged with dirt and her stockings are askew.  ”You gave me something of a fright.”

 

Myka nods, because seeing a naked person alone in the woods can give anyone a bit of a scare.  ”For that I apologize.”

 

“Who are you?”  The girl begins to demand, but Myka can already feel herself slipping.  Her mind knows that this was never meant to be.  Helena had told her once, before MacPherson had debronzed her in what was then Myka’s present, that she would never recall meeting Myka up until that point.  This moment, this brief interaction, this was giving her more hope that she could stomach.

 

Her hand is translucent again, as she reaches out to touch the rounded cheeks of Helena Wells.  ”A friend,” she says quietly.  Her voice is still strong, not wavering or shaking like it usually does when she’s about to vanish.  ”I come in peace.” 


	10. Myka is 30 (Helena is Infinite)

To see a solution in a moment and to have it so deftly ripped from her fingers before she has a chance to change anything devastates her.  She’s always been so careful; so careful to never upset the ebb and flow to unrelenting time.  Yet in this moment, standing in the middle of her father’s bookshop as the clock chimes, once, twice.  It goes on and on until it reaches twelve.  It truly is the witching hour, for Myka wants more than anything in that moment to push herself forwards and to go back to that time when the woman she’s been in love with for much of her life was nothing more than a child. 

She could change it.  Maybe she could save Christina.  Make the world a better place. 

 

She cannot do it.  The cost is too high.  To save Christina would be to save Helena without her ever being bronzed.  The wish is selfish, to know that she could change it all; but that she can never do it.  Helena’s life must play out exactly the way that it did.

The clock stills and with it comes a deathly chill.  Helena has never mentioned meeting Myka in her past.  And Myka’s memories of her childhood misadventure that displaced her to a time when Helena was happier and Christina was still alive are hazy at best. 

They’re chance meetings.  Nothing more than that.  They were never meant to know each other then.  Myka knows that.  This isn’t a truly romantic love story.  She’s just a girl who moves along a set course of unknown circumstances. 

The days blur together and it grows colder.  Winter in Colorado is nothing compared to South Dakota and Myka thinks fondly of her time in Washington, DC, when the winters were mild and the snow an afterthought. 

One night, after the snow had come down exceptionally hard, Myka walks into the street and stares up at the murky darkness of an overcast night.  A few flakes are still falling here and there, and more than anything, Myka wants to displace out of what her life has become. 

Her father finds her there, gathers her up and pulls her inside.  He’s a hard man, but he knows that there are a great many things that Myka is not telling him about her life.  He takes them with stride, and is the silent arm of support she didn’t know she needed.

“Where do you go?”  He asks her one day a few weeks later.  She’s finishing getting ready for the day, the smell of burned hair from the flat-iron still lingering in the air.

She doesn’t really have an answer.  She doesn’t want to curse in front of her father and say that it’s her own personal hell.

Pete comes the following week.  There’s a case and somehow she’s sucked into it.  There’s a new guy, his name is Steve.  He’s a bit like her, and Myka finds that off-putting.  She never wanted to be replaced. 

Still, she likes being on a team again, she likes Steve and she didn’t realize how much she missed Pete until he’s hugging her and she doesn’t want him to ever let go.

The case is Shakespeare-related and Myka’s in her element, they’re all in awe of her.  It’s awesome, the knowledge that she’s acquired over the years.

In the end, though, Pete still tries to get her to come back.  He says that it’s not the same, she has no counter.

Steve just stands there silently, which Myka is grateful for.  He doesn’t know what happened.  How Myka’s poor judgment nearly destroyed the world.

She just wants them to leave, she can’t stay.  She can’t.  It’s too much, too painful.  Everything about it is absolutely wrong.  Steve should be Helena’s partner; they should be working on integrating Claudia to field work.

Later that night, Myka discovers that Mrs. Frederic holds the ace up her sleeve.  Myka stands stunned as the Warehouse’s caretaker turns whatever the orb in her hands is and Helena appears in the middle of her father’s bookshop, Myka’s stomach twists into a knot of angst so tight she’s afraid to breathe.

Helena is there, yet she is not there.  In that moment, her hand passing through what should have been solid skin, what Myka has always known to be solid skin; Helena is infinite.

“Don’t give up on this so easily,” Helena says, and Myka wants to stomp her feet and refuse.  She knows she goes back there.  Back to the dusty room with the statues that were her first friends.  Back to the places she played as a child.  Back to where she knows her future is. 

“I…” The words die in Myka’s throat because she cannot argue against them.  She blames herself for what Helena did.  Blames herself for the pain and the suffering inflicted upon everyone.  Pete’s lost Kelly, Claudia’s trust was betrayed, and Artie will probably never be able to look Myka in the eye again.  “I can’t.”

She wants to know what they’ve done to Helena, why she’s infinite.

“I think,” Mrs. Frederic says as she turns the orb and Helena vanishes into nothingness, “That you’ll find that you can, Agent Bering.”


	11. Myka is 30, Helena is 42

Time stretches infinite before her, and Helena isn’t there anymore.  Myka has to prove herself to everyone, but especially to herself.  Her aim is true, her hand never wavers.  Claudia and Pete know that she’ll be okay - Steve just knows that she’s damn good at her job. 

Myka likes Steve because she’s never encountered him before in any of her displacement.  He’s good and he’s steady, he never asks why she’s so sad.

The Warehouse has a void in it when she’s there and she finds herself avoiding it more often than not.  Claudia finds her once evening as she’s sitting with a journal that she knows she should not have taken from the H.G. Wells sector open across her knees. 

“We’ll get her back,” It isn’t so much a thought as it is a promise.  Claudia’s arm is resolute on her shoulder as the journal drops from Myka’s lap and spills open across the floor.  Her stomach is tight, painful.  She’s been off of Dr. Calder’s pills for a good while now and it terrifies her.  She’s got an appointment on Monday, but this isn’t the same as it usually is.

She hears Claudia, yet she cannot move.  Cannot tell Claudia that she’ll be (hopefully) back in a minute.

She disappears in a pile of clothes and Claudia’s concerned face swimming into inky blackness.

For a long time there is nothingness, and Myka wonders if this is what it is like to be bronzed.  To feel nothing, see nothing, to be completely and utterly trapped within her mind.  It is almost peaceful until the panic as the minutes stretch on infinitely sets in.  She finds herself screaming, fighting with all her might against the terrifying blackness.

Myka takes a deep breath of knowing and pushes against the prison of her displaced body.

She wakes up in a sunlit room, the curtains open and a gentle breeze blowing them away from the sills.  The paint is chipped on the window sills, but plants dot their surfaces in earthenware pots.  Myka inhales and smells the ocean. 

The bed she’s laying on is as white as the curtains.  Her skin feels tender, like she’s traveled a thousand miles.  Her hand rises to her head and she touches her hair.  Some of the curl is returning and she wonders how long she was out for. 

A curl blows across her forehead and she starts, reaching up to brush it away.  A memory creeps up on her then, of Helena’s fingers, warm and comforting as a child - as an adult - as the one constant in her tremulous life.  It is the same gesture that she herself has done many a time, only somehow with more weight and more meaning.  Helena’s fingers had been warm in those moments - they’d been loving and kind.

“I was wondering if you’d sleep until it was time for you to go,” comes an amused voice from the doorway that Myka had, until that moment, yet to notice.  Helena Wells is leaning against the doorframe, a mug of strong-smelling tea in her hands and an amused smile playing at her lips. 

Myka gives half a start and backs up, all knees and sudden nakedness.  Helena is wearing nothing but a long shirt that looks like it might belong to Pete.  It engulfs her and holds her steady in its grasp and Myka is overwhelmed. 

She’s never quite gotten this far before. 

“Hi,” she says sheepishly, and gives herself a moment to finally look at Helena - at this room, at the little traces of her, of  _them_  floating every-which-way across the room.  This is not just a place for Helena, but rather a place for the pair of them.  “How far did I come?”

Helena takes a sip of her tea, the shirt she’s wearing rising dangerously high.  There’s a flash of something on the bedside table, the briefest gleam on the dull brass of her Tesla.  An Eye of Horus pin.  Myka’s eyes flick back to Helena, confusion clearly written across her face as Helena sets her mug down with a practiced ease on the table, obscuring the pin and weapon. 

“Far enough to know I cannot tell you anything,” she says and Myka gulps.  They’re so close together now.  It’s strange and oddly terrifying.  There are more lines on Helena’s face, and she looks tired, oh so tired.  “I know when you came from, Myka,” she says.  Her voice sounds as tired as her face seems and Myka bites her lip worriedly.  “Keep the faith, sweet one.”

“Are you not?” she asks as Helena retrieves her tea and sits back, smugly sipping at as Myka tries to recover her composure. 

She wants to know if Helena had intended to kiss her, or to be that close.  It’s a lover’s closeness.  She’s never actually told Helena - her Helena - about this.  There simply wasn’t the time. 

“Our time is not for a year or so,” Helena says sagely. 

Myka swallows her questions as there is nothing she can do to get the answers she wants.  Instead she turns her attention to the room.  “Where are we?”

“Nantucket Island,” Helena replies.  Her body uncurls and she stands and grabs Myka’s hand and draws her towards the window. She’s not at all fazed by Myka’s nakedness, and Myka cannot shake the feeling of embarrassment at the fact that she’d quite forgotten about clothes up until that moment. Her cheeks burn and Helena flashes her something of a cheeky smile before turning back to the window. “Look,” Helena pulls away the curtain and Myka can see the ocean, Martha’s Vineyard in the distance. 

“It’s beautiful,” Myka whispers as the small white triangle of a sailboat drifts across the ocean.  She can hear a foghorn in the distance, and the sound of waves will be in her bones for days.  “Vacation?”

Helena’s lips draw up into an amused smirk and she gives a half-nod.  “Something like that.”

Myka wants to know what  _that_  means.

There are so many questions that her mind is overwhelmed at where to start first.  She won’t get answers, but she wants to try, has to try. 

Helena slings an arm around Myka’s waist, fingers spreading out across her stomach. It is a kind gesture, resting her cheek on Myka’s shoulder as they stare out the window together.  Myka wonders if she’s doing this because of what happened before – when Myka’s hand passed through Helena as though it were nothing.

“What did they do to you?” Myka asks.  The question isn’t an easy one to ask, nor is it an easy one to comprehend the answer to. 

There are lips on her own, warm and concrete and most assuredly  _there_. Her mouth opens and Helena’s tongue presses forward.  Each second is a promise, the feeling of strong and pure emotion that Myka can barely shake.   Myka blinks as Helena steps away and the lips are gone, she’s gone.  The blackness is back again. 

Claudia is still speaking when she lands, unceremoniously in the middle of her bed.  She’s naked as the day she was born and her fingers are pressed up against her lips.  The  _nerve_ of that woman.


	12. Myka is 8 (and a half)

Tracy notices it first, that Myka likes to disappear into the basement with her father’s old fencing foil. He’d done it once upon a time, back in the day when it was considered somewhat socially acceptable to enjoy swordplay. Their father, after all, is both a lover of the classics and a dinosaur. Myka begs Tracy not to tell and Tracy promises that she won’t.

 

It helps her to stay grounded. The steps back and forth. Her hand on her hip and her two fingers extended. She’s learning the footwork first. She’s watches hours of video.  _The Count of Monte Cristo,_ all of the  _Star Wars_ movies. Anything that will teach her how to move her feet the right way.

“You’re not doing it quite right,” comes her father’s voice. For once it is not filled with anger and frustration, but rather a paternal lint that Myka has not heard in years. Not since before this happened, when the doctors said she was broken somehow in a way that her father cannot fix.

He takes the foil from her hands, and puts his big hands on her hips. She relaxes and he rotates them slightly, shifting her to the proper position. ”You have the steps down,” he says, as they step together.

Step, slide, lunge. Back and forth across the floor.

It becomes a habit, when she vanishes. It calms her in the room full of statues, in the room full of endless wonder. It protects her from the man with the glasses, from herself, from the people who only want to hurt her when they see she is young, alone, and without clothes.

“Dad,” she asks one day, she’s eight-and-a-half officially tomorrow, but Myka feels important enough to ask today. Her father is reading over some reports from the bookstore and is adding things up on the special kind of calculator with a receipt tape in it. Myka thinks that those are the best kind. ”Can I ask you something?”

He blinks and pulls off his glasses, peering down severely at her. ”What is it, sport?” he asks.

“Why do I always see the same person when I go places?” Myka knows that the question sounds as silly as when she demanded that she could have the Rainbow Brite sweatshirt that she’s worn all winter for Christmas.

Her father stares at her, bends down and scoops her up. His face is drawn and worried, but he’s pressing a kiss to her temple. ”Do you know what they say about princesses in the stories?”

Myka nods.

“They marry princes, right?”

Myka nods again.

“That person - that’s your prince,” Her father explains.

Myka’s brow narrows. ”Girls can’t be princes,” she frowns. ”My person is a  _girl_.”

Her father’s lips make a thin line and he pats her on the head twice before setting her back down on the floor. ”Go practice your footwork, sport.”

She retreats quietly, and wonders what she’s done wrong this time.


	13. Myka is 30 (Helena is Infinite)

She finds being around Pete hard sometimes, but other times she shoves on a brave face and takes him in with the same indulgent smile she’s always had.  She tries not to think about how this place has taken away the one thing that she’s ever truly loved enough to call a constant.  

 

The Warehouse comes in ebbs and flows, and Myka wanders more than she’s ever done before.  Steve catches her at it, more often than not, but he lets her go with a smile and a not.  She’s not the only one who’s hurting.  

They’re give a case, one that Helena worked on back at Warehouse 12, and Myka makes her arguments that they should get to see her again.  That  _she_ should get to see her again.  To her surprise, Artie doesn’t put up much of an argument.  This is a white whale of an artifact.  Joshua’s Trumpet, literally making the walls come tumblin’ down by blasting them into non-existence.

Pete doesn’t let her talk to Helena, he won’t say why and Myka’s not fool enough to try when he’s not paying attention.  She takes Dr. Calder’s pills and pretends to not feel the scathing cut of the comments that Pete makes to Helena. She thinks to the future, to that room on Nantucket, and how this was all going to be fixed soon enough.

After they’ve found the trumpet, Myka finds herself a-wandering, again.  Helena trails after her, a silent specter attached to the display orb that Claudia has yet to explain in a way that makes sense to anyone other than herself.  

“I hate that they’ve done this to you,” Myka says as they turn down Alpha 54-K-Omega.  She has to put Helena away soon, has to do a lot of things that she doesn’t want to do.  She thinks that Helena might be the prince from the stories that she’s destined to fall in love with.

Helena’s eyes are sad, dull and lifeless.  She doesn’t look well, drawn and weary.  She is a hologram, not a person.  

Myka wants to touch her, to feel her skin warm and move under tentative fingertips.  She wants a lot of things she can’t have anymore. 

“We make a good team,” she says quietly, fingers trailing down the wood of one of the shelving units next to them.  

“We do,” Helena agrees.

Myka stares at her then, and sees the love that she’s always longed for reflected in Helena’s eyes.  She doesn’t dare hope, and her hand is shaking as she reaches forward, Helena’s image blurred and rippling under her touch.

She feels the dry sob well up within her and she swallows to try and force it down.  Helena takes a step forward, her expression one of helpless desperation.  Myka wants to give up on her strength and to throw herself into Helena’s arms.  To cry and sob for the future that is still so far off, for the present that is ripping Helena away from her again and again.  The past is set in stone, no matter how many times she contemplates changing it.

Shakily, Myka straightens and presses her fingers to her temples.  Her head aches with the pressure of holding everything in.  She’s stretched so thin she feels like she’s about to break and she doesn’t pick her next words carefully, “I just wish you’d realized that sooner.”

Helena opens her mouth to reply, her hand flying to the place at her neck where her locket used to be.  Myka can see the hurt in her eyes and she buries her fear at bringing it about under a wave of dark emotions and her own feelings of betrayal.  

“Goodbye, Helena,” She says, and shuts off the orb.

She can’t help how she hurts, can’t help how painful this is.  She can only press forward to a future as uncertain as her steps as she lets the orb hang loosely at her side.  

Maybe she’s a fool to believe in the future that her displacement allows her, but she has to believe in something.


	14. Myka is 30, Emily Lake is Supposedly 34

It is the cruelest of fates, when Myka looks back on it later.  She hasn’t had  _time_  to think in what feels like years.  She’s running backwards and forwards across the world, trying to stop the inevitable before it becomes too late.  

Yet it is the cruelest of fates.

 

Adwin Kosan had promised Helena something more precious than anything else.  He’d sworn on the ancient covenant that governed the regents.  They all knew of Myka’s displacement, they all knew what she didn’t talk about from the future.  Myka has always appeared to be resigned to the future she sees there.  

Helena knows more, but the smile that she has is private.

That smile is gone now.

Myka knows that it is the cruelest of fates, standing in the middle of a high school staring at Helena.  Helena who is corporeal and  _real_  and there.  Helena whose skin would warm under Myka’s touch - whose kisses would make Myka week at the knees.

Helena who doesn’t know her.

Myka feels the pull at the pit of her stomach and clenches her fist.  She drives it hard into a nearby locker, the pain enough to keep her here.  Here in this time and place that she does not want to be, staring down a woman she doesn’t think she can stomach seeing.

“Pete…” she trails off into the com in her ear.  ”Pete, she doesn’t know me.”

His response is a breathless ‘I’m coming up there’ and Myka tries not to wince as her hand throbs with pain.  Her knuckles are bruised, she knows this, but the pain is keeping her centered and not displacing forwards or backwards to god-knows-when.  

Pete’s hand is on her shoulder in what feels like seconds and they go in together.  He’s as shocked as she is, and together, they meet Emily Lake.

It is the oddest experience of Myka’s life.  She is speaking to Helena, who is not Helena.  She’s had that conversation before, but Helena was  _nine_  years old at the time so Myka’s pretty sure that it hardly counts.

She listens to the story, it’s bull and Pete knows it too.  He keeps giving her long looks as she can’t quite stop her hands from shaking.  It gets worse when they meet Dickens the cat, because Myka knows that Helena despises cats above all other creatures.  It is the final straw, the one that makes it real.

Myka doesn’t want it to be real.

Emily Lake is afraid of them, doesn’t trust them and gets herself kidnapped at the soonest possible opportunity.  By Steve of all people, who is apparently working with their enemy.  Myka’s trying to repress every emotion she’s ever felt relating to Helena as she wakes up and sees that Steve is gone.

“They’re going to hurt her,” she says as Pete pulls her to her feet.

Pete’s expression is grim, “Not if we get there first.”

Myka tries to forget that the future is never written, it is constantly in flux. Deluding herself that this could all somehow work out is all she has, and she’s clinging to it like it is her raft in the middle of a turbulent sea.  


	15. Myka is 30 (Helena is Infinite)

How she manages to hang on is anyone’s guess.  She’s popped four of Doctor Calder’s pills in the last twenty minutes, staring blindly out into the road.  They’ve been to a vault hidden in the back of a grocery store about two hours north of Cheyenne, and they’re now driving back towards the Warehouse.  

 

The orb that holds her future, that holds past and her present is cradled in her reverent hands.  She does not dare jostle it for fear of hurting Helena, even though she consciously knows that she cannot.  

Maybe it is a foolish thing, but its all that they can cling to in this moment.  

Her body aches to move forward, backwards, sideways in time to replace this feeling of desperate terror that now grips her.  

Pete keeps glancing at her.  She can see his eyes moving from the road and she tries to reassure both him and Claudia that she’s going to stay here and now.  She can’t leave.  She can’t.  

She  _won’t._

Her mind is racing a mile a minute and when Artie calls them and tells them of what he suspects is Sykes plan there really is only one option.  They stop and Myka bites hard on the inside of her cheek, staring up at the sky trying to think of a way that is not this.

 Claudia figures out how the coin works, and Myka lets it warm her hand as she presses it into the orb once again.  They all stare at Helena and she stares back at them.

There are million things that need to be said, but they are left unsaid, silent - unbidden.  Emotions she could never express bubble to the surface and she stares at this woman that she’s come to love so desperately.

They say their goodbyes, and when Helena lies and says that she is not noble Myka lets off a short bark of nigh-hysterical laughter.  They all know that it isn’t true.  

“How do you say goodbye to the one person who knows you better than anyone else?” Helena asks and Myka doesn’t have an answer.  The words die in her throat as she stares into Helena’s eyes, her vision blurry with tears.  

“I-” she says weakly.  ”I don’t know.”  Regret fills her and she can’t think of the future she’s been to now.  There’s no possible hope that that will ever be her’s.  It can’t be, there’s no way out of this.

Pete is right - they have to destroy the coin once and for all. Myka’s control is failing.  She can’t watch this and says as much pulling a teary Claudia away and towards the car.

It is in that moment, as she steps away, that it happens.

She steps forward and backwards in time so quickly that she barely even registers that it happens.  There’s lips on her own and hands in her hair, and a quiet whisper of, “I do.”

They’re both time travelers, of a fashion.  It somewhat makes sense.

Her body moves through genetic mutation, not magic, but in that moment, what fills Myka’s heart has no other explanation.  She is filled, completely and utterly imbued with hope.  

Pete’s shouts draw them back and they find Steve and Sykes holding guns at all of them and chaos reigns.  Myka collapses against the ground, the stunning effects of the Tesla’s rays sparking odd patterns across their bodies as they fall.

Claudia’s run off into the woods - Steve’s chased her.

Myka’s last thought is of the coin and her one solid connection to Helena.  She cannot let them have her.


	16. Myka is 30 and 21

They’re running as fast as they can - they don’t think that they’ll make it.  Their little family has been separated, gouged a deep wound that cuts into Myka’s subconscious and forces her wide awake.  

Pete lowers his rifle and runs down the stairs.  Myka has seen many emotions pass over his face in the past few weeks.  Anger and hurt and betrayal do not hold a candle to this emotion - he is overcome.  That’s the only word she can think of when she too lowers her rifle and stares up at the room that they’ve come to. 

“Claudia,” Pete says, his voice a deathly calm and Myka knows the worst then.  ”Go back to the car.”

 

Steve is dead and Claudia has shut down.  Her voice is blank and face a stony mask of anger so powerful that Myka fears for Claudia’s soul.  She’s barely holding it together, hanging on by the simple thread of a moment she’s barely comprehending.

“Pete,” she says quietly as Claudia starts in on the laptop.  ”I’m going to  _leave_.”

His eyes widen and he reaches for her with fumbling fingers and fear in his eyes.  ”You… you can’t.”  He pulls her in close and wraps his arms around her, clinging to her desperately.  ”You won’t know where we are.”

Myka whispers a promise she does not feel she can keep, listening as Claudia tells them that there’s no hope for this laptop.  The kid’s wiped it clean and there’s nothing she can do to get the information back.

“Where do we go from here?” She asks, falling back to her knees and clutching Steve’s lifeless hand.  

Myka’s vision winks out and she falls backwards though time, her stomach feeling as though she’s taken a knee to it.  The wind from her lungs is gone and she falls back to reality so suddenly that she gasps for air.

“How old are we?” a voice asks from beside her, and Myka rolls over to see her first apartment, where she lived from her junior year though her first year of graduate school.  

The bedroom here is marked with indicators of how old she was at the time. There’s movie posters tacked up and the feeling of utter loss is so great that Myka finds her body curling around herself in the first bed she’d ever owned, sobbing hysterically.

Her own hands soothe her back, whisper words that at the time sounded clumsy and meaningless.  

“What the hell happened,” she asks herself, hair frizzing in the light from the lamp on the bedside table.  Thelava lamp. God, she was awful as a teenager.  ”You straightened your hair.”

Myka reaches up to touch it, thinking of what Helena had said.  She wasn’t this noble, none of them were.  Helena was safe, for the time being.  This was out of time, Helena was in the dusty room full of bronzed statues.  Away from Walter Sykes and the evil that lurked deep within him.  

“I had to change,” she shrugged, sitting up and surveying the room.  ”I’m thirty, by the way.”

Her college-aged self tucks a bookmark into a book that Myka instantly recognizes   She feels a sob well up in her chest and she reaches for the book blindly.  The pages fall open to the title page and she feels a second wave of sobbing come upon her.  

In her own copy, some nine years later, Helena would write a dedication across the pages of this book.  She had smiled kindly at Myka over the book between them and had bent to write something that Myka had never quite dared look at until Helena was long gone and trapped by the Regents and their twisted form of justice. 

“What the hell happened to you?” her younger self demands.  

Myka sets the book down and shakes her head.  ”I can’t tell you that,” she sighs, fingers combing her hair back into place.  She’s naked and she doesn’t much care, everything is messed up now.  ”You know the rules.”

There’s a mute nod and Myka feels herself pull forward once again.  ”Thank you,” she breathes, and touches her younger self’s face.  There’s so much innocence there that will soon be gone.  Myka hates it.  First Sam and then Helena too.

Myka wakes up on an airplane speeding towards what she can only suppose is destiny.  She’s crammed into a tiny bathroom with a bag of clothes beside her and a note from Pete.  ”I got a tip,” it says.  ”Thank me later.”

She dresses and hurries forward to find the man who’s somehow become her best friend.  Hopefully the clothes won’t alter what comes next too much.  She’d rather not get arrested by an air marshal on top of how terrible her day has already been.

“Hi Pete,” she says, sitting down next to him.  ”Where are we going?”


	17. Myka is 30, Helena is 34

When Pete hands Myka two pills and a heartfelt note from Doctor Calder, Myka is grateful.  The pills will keep her here even if nothing else will.  She has to stay grounded, in constant contact with this time and this place.  She cannot lose sight of the present at such a pivotal juncture of her life.  

The pills sit in her stomach, churning as they race to piece together clues that Myka cannot help but think are going to end with more dead bodies than she cares to add to their already growing total.  

Sykes has Helena.  He’s taken her for some dire mission that Pete and Artie both are at a complete loss of how to explain.  An evil man has the one person that’s ever been a constant in the ever-shifting timeline of Myka’s life. 

She refuses to lose Helena again.  They will make it through this.

The set of her jaw is determined as she hip-checks an emergency exit in the middle of a crowded food court at the heart of this strange city they’re in.  Somewhere in China, she’s been too distracted to make note of exactly where in Tai Po they are.  There’s more English here than Chinese and she knows that that’s just a colonial carry-over.  

She wonders how Helena must find all of this.  Myka almost feels herself smiling as she follows Pete down a rickety staircase into a room lit only by a single grimy yellow light bulb.  She thinks of how Helena would take a place like this, the lights and constant assault of people at all angles pressing in around her would not sit well in the time traveler’s stomach.

The amusement does little to abate the dread that’s settled in the pit of Myka’s stomach.  She can hear her blood rushing in her ears, her pulse racing blood to extremities she can barely feel.

Maybe it’s the displacement, but she can feel Helena’s presence.  She’s here.  

Pete lets out a frustrated sound because there is nothing here.  They are alone in a dark basement with nothing but a gut feeling from a person who doesn’t normally get them.  It isn’t much at all.

“There’s nothing here,” Pete says, and Myka shakes her head no.  There has to be something here.  Steve did not die for nothing, and Helena - well, Helena’s returning was not a coincidence.  It could not be.  Never.  This was fated to happen, a knot in her string, connecting them, weaving them together.

They could make it through this.  

She almost kicks it before she sees it, and bends down to scoop up Helena’s necklace from the ground.  It’s dirty and looks as though it’s been stepped on, but it’s a clue that they desperately need.  

“Look,” she says, and Pete cracks a grin.  

“Knew she’d come through for us.”

Myka doesn’t tell him that no, he didn’t.  She cannot tell him that she can see through his bravado and obvious respect for her to know when he’s lying to her.  

Steve, at least, could have blamed it on his gift.

Steve is dead.  

When they stumble their way into the Regent’s Sanctum and see what exactly it is that Sykes has gotten them into, Myka’s stomach lurches.

Helena is pointing a gun at her again, only this time, Myka is positive the threat is real.

Perhaps life is like this diabolical chess game, and Helena’s shaking voice calling out plays as she levels a gun at Myka is just part of the plan.  The fates call the plays from afar, there’s no chance to audible at the line.  

Sykes has got this all figured out, and when the kid dies as Helena can’t quite crack the lock, Myka feels him use the artifact he’s been using to control Helena to play a more dangerous sort of a game.  

“You are the only one, Wells,” he keeps saying, over and over again, riding crop clenched between two hands and a vindictive expression on his face.  ”You are the only one.”

Myka can hear the desperation in Helena’s voice as she tries to reason with him.  She is not expecting Helena to move jerkily towards her, and put a gun at her temple and whisper that she’s sorry.

“Perhaps all Ms. Wells lacked was proper motivation,” Sykes coos happily as Myka tries to stop shaking.  The lock clamps around her neck and the pieces slide back into place.  It’s a standard play, she’s actually been in this position before.  There has got to be logic to win it.  ”Three moves,”  Sykes adds, waving the crop around.  ”Tick tock.”

The urge to leave this time, to run away from this moment and her problems is so strong that Myka can feel the displacement coming almost before Helena tries to reason with their monster of a puppet-master  “I…” Myka begins, and Helena shakes her off.  

“Stay,” is all she whispers before straightening.  ”Don’t leave me.”

Myka could say the same to Helena.


	18. Myka is 30, Helena is 34

So much of her life has been spent in this one desperate moment of existence that the entire future seems like an afterthought on occasion. Myka’s future doesn’t seem to last much longer than a few seconds down the road at this passing juncture in time.  

Her breath comes quickly, her eyes scan the chessboard in front of her, and she bites at her lip knowing that this really could truly be the end.  

Helena is shaking.

 

All Myka can hear is her heart beating a thundering stampede of horses in her ears and the quiet rattling as the gun in Helena’s hands shakes dangerously close to her ear.  

“I…”  Helena begins, and Myka knows that this cannot be easy.  There’s a solution here to win the game and take the king.  Which will unlock or undo whatever it is that Sykes wants done.  If there even is a solution, which she somewhat doubts at this point in time.

She wonders if she were to float away to a time not yet seen if this will all be just a bad dream.  If their time traveling lives will ever end in a peaceful moment of stillness between them that stretches on for an eternity. 

Her breath comes quickly as she swallows.

“Make a move,” Sykes growls and flexes the riding crop in his hands.  Myka hears the trigger pull back on the gun in Helena’s hand rather than sees it, and closes her eyes.  She’d rather die with a bullet in her brain than cleaved in two like the body of that poor boy that they’ve just tossed on the floor like he wasn’t someone’s son.

Helena’s breath hisses low and she grinds out a move that does not satisfy the board one bit, and the first step of Myka’s doom slides forwards into place.

“I can’t do this,” Helena breathes and Myka tries to find the strength within herself to tell Helena that it’s okay - that she believes in her enough to solve this - this terrible riddle.

They’ve never had enough  _time_  and now it like their moments are all tumbling together into one and this is all that’s left.

“You can,” Myka promises firmly, and she believes it too.  Helena is a great many things, and smart enough to figure this terrible joke of a lock out is definitely one of them.  ”I know you can.”

Helena lets out an almost anguished cry and Myka takes a deep breath. She doesn’t care, all of a sudden, that Sykes and Pete are there and that she is probably going to die within the next five minutes.  She believes in the future that she’s seen over and over again, displacing back and forth across the night sky.  

“I was nine the first time I met you - the you I’ve come to know,” Myka explains and Sykes blinks and leans forward.  He’s an evil bastard, but this is interesting and probably new to him.  

Temporal Displacement, after all, is not exactly something that one talks about every day, even in scientific communities.  

“What do you mean?”  Helena asks.

Myka smiles, thinking that time.  ”I had fallen back, farther than I’d ever fallen before, and I was lost and scared.”  She shakes her head, thinking of that moment and how long ago it truly was.  ”I was crying in the bowels of a room full of statues, and you came and found me.”   

Helena’s eyes widen and the memory is clearly there.  ”I was playing chess with Chaturanga - he was…” Her eyes narrow and she stares hard at the board.  ”Cheating,” she mutters.

“Make a move, Ms. Wells,” Sykes says pointedly and Myka can see the gears at the back of Helena’s brilliant mind racing towards a conclusion that they can both only hope ends in her surviving this terrible ordeal.

She’s laughing and crying, she’s hysterical almost, but as the tears begin to fall down her face, Myka can feel the determination welling up within her.  ”Helena,” she whispers as Helena stares hard at the board, “I need you to take a deep breath.”

“I can’t do this,” Helena protests.  She’s nearly crying too and Myka wishes that she hadn’t been such a fool before - leaving off all those conversations to be better left unsaid.  The meaning was there, always.  The words were never spoken.

She should have said them.  

“You can,” Myka insists.  ”I believe in you!” Her voice grows in volume and pitches higher as she goes.  ”I believed in you when no one else would - and you took that and threw it in my face - but I know why you did it!  You had to heal from damage that was done long before I was ever present -“

“Myka, darling, you’re a constant in my life since I was a child,” Helena protests.

Pete, bless him, cuts in, “Not the place or the time, H.G.”

Myka could kiss him.  ”I meant like it is now.  Like we are here.  Now.  Together.  I want to be able to say that now I’ve believed in you and I was right.”

Helena shakes her head, “I could kill you.”

“You could have before,” Myka retorts.

“Knight to E7,” Helena says suddenly and doom inches closer.

They’re both crying now and Myka knows that this soon could all be over.  She doesn’t want to die with Sykes’ mocking face staring at her.  ”Helena, I want you to think, and then I want you to take a breath and save my life.”

The silence in the room is deafening.  Nothing can be heard save the steady drip of water down in a corner.

“Change the rules,” Helena mutters all of a sudden and realization dawns across her face.  ”Myka,” she says. “Do you trust me?”

Myka smiles up at her, “Always,”  because she is about to die. 

“C3 pawn to…” she points to the place on the board and Myka moves the piece dutifully.  

And she does not die.


	19. Myka is 30, Helena is 34

There is a gap then, where she passes in and out of time once more. She feels it more than anything else, cutting into her arms and slicing her down to the bone. She is not dead, but rather she is something else all together. Her body collapses in against itself and she is once again not quite whole.

She has no idea if she’s going backwards or forwards or both. The future seems far more than uncertain and the past is turbulent.

She stands barefoot in her father’s kitchen, naked save herself.

And she is crying.

“What year did you come from?” she asks herself, and Myka has no answer that makes sense. She is maybe ten here, eleven? She can’t recall ever having a black eye and nursing it with an icepack at three in the morning. “I just got back from the statue room. The curly haired fat man was chasing me and I fell.”

It bubbles out of her and she finds herself laughing. Hands clutching at her sides that shake so much they hurt. This is all too much.

The Warehouse rules her life, and time keeps her hostage.

“It’s hard to say,” She answers in turn. She had always been a curious child, after all. Her voice sounds breathless and she can still feel the burn of iron around her neck. It’s choking the life out of her despite it being gone and she’s crashing forward once more. Helena’s hand is gently slapping her cheek and she looks almost desperate for Myka to wake up.

Myka cannot breathe and surges forward, her body shaking as she wraps her arms awkwardly around Helena’s shoulders and refuses to let go. There is warmth there and realness. A solidness that feels almost suffocating as she forces air in and out of her lungs.

They are two souls, and as their future stretches out forever, Myka knows that the drugs that Pete gave her earlier are keeping her here and grounded - but her mind can still leave and it does. Over and over again she pulls herself back as Helena’s fingers trace soothing patterns on her back.

“I take it that your erm… condition is making this hard?” Helena asks as Myka finally finds it within herself to relax. She’s not sure how long it’s been, or where Pete is, where Sykes is.

Myka swallows and nods almost meekly. She is not weak, but she cannot help this. Her body is rebelling in this moment and her mind cannot stay put and her past and future flashes before her eyes - wide open and staring blankly at the wide expanse of wall behind them.

There is this sort of smirk that comes over Helena’s face, and her fingers trail upwards to linger at the back of Myka’s neck, and then to brush against her ears and finally cup her cheeks.

The present suddenly seems like the place to be, and Helena leans forward and rests her forehead against Myka’s own. Her breath is warm against Myka’s lips and nose - and her cheeks are burning in this basement thousands of miles away from anything that familiar to either of them.

“I-” Myka starts. She’s going to tell Helena of the future that she sees stretching out forever. She doesn’t care about the rules, they can change them, make their own. Myka isn’t going to let them get take Helena away from her every again, her hands are clenched into tight fists as Helena smiles charmingly at her and then does something that Myka did not quite expect her to ever do outside of her fantasies and the future that doesn’t quite make sense to her even now.

Her lips are warm and kind and Myka wants to melt into them as she lets Helena kiss her. Her mind feels sharper, less foggy and the images are all but gone. She asks herself, in her mind’s eye, why the future is so full of hurting and the past so lonely.

It is because of this woman. She is the future.

When Helena pulls away she looks immensely pleased with herself, and Myka raises fingers that are still trembling just a little bit to touch her lips. “It’s always been you,” she breathes. “Always you.”

“I guessed,” Helena smiles, sitting back on her heels. “Now that I have you firmly in this time - come and help me figure out how to reopen that portal.”

Myka just shakes her head and takes Helena’s hand and they pull themselves to their feet as one. They’re two beautiful minds, and they are sure to be able to figure this out.


	20. Myka is 20 and 30, Helena is 34

They find their way back, fumbling towards an end goal that seems almost impossible.  Myka has half a mind to just call in a favor from a CIA buddy she’s had since the academy and get on a fight home, but Helena is stead-fast and they reset the lock and then open the portal once more.

Artie is acting strange, and as they run through the Warehouse after him, he’s babbling about bombs and death and the end of the world.  Myka knows that Helena must see it, and she can sense Artie watching her - knowing that she probably already knows. It is not easy when you know the catastrophic consequences of the future.  Even harder when you try to not admit that you know.  Myka has a lifetime of practice, and Artie has had all of five minutes to adjust.

But the world doesn’t end and they all live and they are still standing.

Spring is dawning in South Dakota.

Leena makes tea for them and they sit on her back porch - staring out into the silent badlands that creep until they’ve just about hit the bluff where Leena’s bed and breakfast sits.  Helena hums contentedly into her tea, and Myka fiddles with her spoon.  She doesn’t know what to do or say.

The breeze ruffles around them, a gentle touch and just the hint of coldness in the air.  They mustn’t forget that it is still South Dakota, and the nights are still cold here. 

“What’s it like, always know the future?” Helena asks.

Myka shrugs.  “Same as knowing the past as well as you do, I’d expect.” There are a lot of other answers to the question, but not enough words to ever tell them.  They are truly time travelers, and now Artie is one as well.  They both know it, and the fear of it cuts deep within them.

Helena’s hand snakes across the space between them, still warm from her tea, and squeezes Myka’s hand gently. 

Turning to look at her, Myka feels a weak smile draw across her lips.  Steve is still gone, and there’s still a void in her heart that she can’t quite explain.  Their fingers tangle together as the breeze rustles the not quite blooming trees. 

And they are born anew.

Night comes with cold and the ever-present threat of something that they scarce dare name.  Artie is back at the Warehouse with Mr. Kosan and Mrs. Frederic.  And there’s a sense of dread that settles over Myka. 

She takes one of Doctor Calder’s pills, and ducks up the stairs and out of sight.

She’s going to disappear.

A blink and she’s sitting in her college dorm, watching herself get dressed for class in the middle of an icy winter. 

“When are you from?”  she asks herself, pulling a robe off of the back of the door and handing it over.  “And when did you last sleep?”

She smiles weakly, and pulls the robe on, tying it effortlessly.  “Long ago, and far from now - I’m thirty.”

“You’re ancient,” she says to herself and they both grin.  Because Myka had always thought she’d die of her disease long before she reached the age of thirty.  Because she thinks she’ll be young forever, maybe immortal. 

“Hardly,” she replies, and sits down on the edge of the bed.  “But you’re right, I am tired.”

She looks at herself in that moment and wonders if she was ever so impossibly naive   Foolish and full of youthful dreams to be something better than what she will someday become.  She is Myka Bering, she is the sum of all of her parts.  

Herself in college sits down beside her and takes her hand.  ”Do you want to talk about what’s bothering you?” she asks.

And Myka shakes her head.  ”I’ve seen the future,” she explains, “and it is not what you want for yourself.”

“Why not,” herself in college demands.  Myka wonders if she ever really was this young, fostering crushes on Victorian English professors and never once questioning who she is.  She’s young and impulsive.  On a college-level fencing team and well liked by all.  She’s something to be looked up to, not looked down upon.

But she still wishes that someday her father will accept and understand her.

It is something Myka knows will never happen.  

“I’m gay.” she blurts out.

“I know.” she doesn’t look at herself in that moment, because she’s never actually said the words, just thought them and felt them and been afraid of them.  There’s nothing to be afraid of now.

“I’m in love with a woman years out of time.” 

“I know,” at this moment, Myka looks up sharply to see herself grinning roguishly  and she realizes that yes, at this age she’d been to Helena’s time.  She’d been twice. and each time had very nearly killed her.  Now’s she’s afraid of what might happen should she say what comes next.

“They’re going to take her away from me,” she buries her head in her hands and the emotion of the day washes over her, full of feeling and breathless fear.  She cannot let them take Helena from them, not so soon after she’s been restored.  Helena is too important, and they are all too fragile.

Far, far too fragile. 


	21. Myka is 19, Helena is 66

She hears echoes across this space, standing naked in the room full of statues where she always appears. Cold wraps around her here like a lover that she doesn’t have. There is no blanket folded in the corner like there usually is, and her body is so, so cold. This place that has been like a second home to her since she had been so impossibly young now feels like a prison to her. She doesn’t know it anymore, and the faces here somehow seem different.   
  
The pills that they gave her are not helping and she feels like she’s drowning. Her lungs gulp in dusty air and her bare feet leave footprints in the dust across this room, marking her journey past the status and into darkness once more.   
  
She must have gone back or forward more than before. That’s what it’s got to be. This place seems alien and unknown. The shelves are pressing in around her.  
  
The room is full of statues, same as always, their faces cast in shadow. The hulking form of the machine before them seemed far darker than usual, and she steps forward to stare at it.  
  
“I have a coat, if you want it,” comes a voice across the floor, and she turns, her hand still clenched on the handle of the hulking machine with its yellow and red stripes and high-tech looking control system. “If you’d step away from the Bronzer.”  
  
She tints her head, but steps away nimbly on her toes. She’s tempted to run, as she always is. Down the steps and among the statues. There’s voices here again, and she takes the coat that’s tossed to her out of the shadows.  
  
“How far have I come?” she asks, pulling it around her body and wrinkling her nose at the old-lady smell of it. Hopefully this isn’t the guardian of this place, the curly-haired man’s girlfriend or something. That’d be bad, embarrassing even.   
  
The woman in the shadows steps forward, her hair pulled back into a loose bun at the base of her neck. It is streaked with gray, but there’s this youthful spark in her eyes that reminds Myka of so many times before hand.   
  
“Hello Myka,” she says, hands in the pockets her pants, cardigan and shirtsleeves rolled up. “It’s been a while.”  
  
“Has it?” she asks, and tilts her head to the side. She’s see this woman time after time, she knows her name, knows her body. She’s seen this woman across a span of centuries and she never seems to change that much.   
  
She’s older now, and Myka knows she’s stumbled into an impossible future.   
  
There is a small smile that she’s met with in that moment, and Myka finds herself grinning sheepishly in an old woman’s overcoat across the space between them. She feels giddy, her head is still spinning and she, like always, cannot keep her feet grounded in the here and the now. One wrong step and she’ll be tumbling through time once again.   
  
“I’ve never been good at this,” she says in response, and a tired hand reaches out and Myka takes it. She’s greeted with worn fingertips and close cropped nails. Not what she’d expect, for the skin is tanned and well worked, but not dry and brittle like an old person’s. She feels eyes on her then, warm and brown and oh so full of a pain that Myka cannot comprehend or even imagine. “You’re so impossibly young.”  
  
She bows her head, almost out of deference. “And you aren’t how I remember you.” Because the woman she remembers was beautiful in that time, with flowers in her hair and none of the sadness in her eyes.  
  
There’s an ominous sort of something in the air and Myka fees fingers squeeze her hand tentatively, her mind already lost, full wonder at impossible possibilities. She doesn’t know who she is in this world, she doesn’t know if she’s dead.  
  
(She’s pretty sure she is.)  
  
“Once, they told me that when I found a timeline that I liked, that I’d stick to it,” Myka says, fingers scraping against skin as the hand in her own is wrenched away with deceptive strength. “Is it you that I follow, or do you follow me?”  
  
A shrug and kind brown eyes seem to run, as a single tear trails down that aged face. “I don’t know Myka. We’re both time travelers after a fashion.”  
  
There are a million questions in that moment, wrapped up in old and young bodies clinging to each other as the reality of their lives is to difficult to shoulder alone. Myka lets herself stay there and enjoy that feeling of tenderness.  
  
She’s felt a future span on forever and followed it back again to the source. Maybe this is her ending, but it could also be the beginning. She knows, for maybe the first time in her life, that she is loved unconditionally. It will always be this way, spanning two lifetimes of circumstances.  
  
“You’ve never told me how,” she whispers into the gentle bend of this old woman’s neck. There’s two chains there, pressed simple and the warm metal of a wedding band presses against the bare skin that the jacket won’t do to cover up. “How you traveled so far.”  
  
And as she starts to fade away, Myka sees laughter in those brown eyes. “Look around you Myka,” comes the voice as if through water. “The answer is before your eyes.”


	22. Myka is 30, Helena is 34

Mrs. Frederic comes in like a specter in the night and her hair is streaked with white. Myka thinks of her like the northern wind, blowing in cold tidings of disaster and strife. Her expression is stoic as she calls out for Helena from the doorway back into the house. 

Helena rises and rests her hand on Myka’s shoulder. “I shan’t be long,” she says with a smile and Myka wishes that it were true. She knows better than to expect anything less than heartbreak from Helena now, no matter how much she longs for a better outcome. 

“Okay,” the words feel forced out of Myka’s mouth as she stares off into the distance across the grey badlands. Nothing is moving, and a frost is growing across the still-young spring branches. Myka watches it with fascination as the cold seems to take her.

She’s taken three of Doctor Calder’s pills, and she doesn’t think that she’ll displace. She can see Helena and Mrs. Frederic through the fogged-up living room window, their skin glowing in the yellow halos of light that the lamp casts upon them. They’re both beautiful creatures in that moment, and Myka wants to hate them both so much.

When she was young, they told her that she’d find a timeline and stick to it. That it was her curse to find the one person in all the world whose time was more important than her own. When she was younger, she used to imagine him as a prince - a dazzling knight in shining armor or a scathingly intelligent intellectual. A man with a gun and a badge, a woman out of time.

She settles on the woman out of time every time. She’s seen times when she is dead, when she is not even born.

She’s seen Helena Wells as a child. She once knew Christina.

She understands the depth of the hurt and the sorrow that had once driven Helena to desperate measures, and in this moment where Helena is the one who is fit to disappear at any moment. Myka longs to be the one to take her to some other time, where no one can get them. 

The future is not written in stone, Helena had told herself that, once upon a time. 

Helena’s expression is stoic and she’s got her arms wrap around herself. Myka can’t look anymore. She tears her eyes from the window and picks up her stone-cold tea and stands at the edge of the porch, her shoes poking off the edge of the wooden slats.

She could start walking and wake up in eighteen-seventy and for the first time in her life, Myka is scared of that prospect. She has to stay in the here and the now. Her face is a grim mask when the screen door bangs and she feels Helena return to her.

“They want to interrogate you,” she guesses and Helena barks a laugh that sounds almost hysterical. 

Warm fingers trace a path up her back through her thin shirt, and rest on her shoulder. “Arthur… I believe he’s done something horrible.”

Myka cannot answer, because the words catch in her throat and she chokes on them. She doesn’t dare speak regardless. She’s afraid of what she might say, what she might tell Helena. It’s the sort of thing that has to develop organically. 

She looks out across the growing night and sighs. “Can I at least have tonight?” The question, when it comes to the Warehouse’s people, is usually the sort that falls on deaf ears. The Warehouse is more interested in protecting itself than its people, and it’s just as Pete says. They’re all going to end up dead, bronzed or insane.

She knows she dies.

That’s enough for her.

“Mrs. Frederic thinks that we should all stay put, in case my theory is correct, at least until morning.” Helena flashes a cheeky grin at Myka and Myka can’t quite bring herself to smile back enough to reach her eyes. 

Her entire face hurts when she does it, anyway. It’s all the same lie, over and over again.

They come together, only to be ripped apart.

“Let’s go upstairs?” Helena suggests with more of that cocky swagger that Myka once upon a time found so alluring. She’s had this woman before, and will again before the night is out. She’s always told herself that her first time with forever was on the eve of heartbreak.

She never thought it’d be like this.

The stairs creek ominously as they tip-toe up them. Mrs. Frederic is spending the night and they’re all not entirely certain what that means. Leena is standing with a towel in her hands. “I didn’t realize you’d be back,” she says to Helena, who takes the towel without a word. “I’ll get Artie to put your room back—”

“Don’t bother,” Helena sighs. “I… doubt I’ll be staying much longer than tonight.”

“Oh…” Leena trails off, and stares at the floor for a moment before she heads off towards the third floor. “Well, see you in the morning.”

“Goodnight,” Myka breathes, and Helena’s pulling her out of the dim light in the hallway and pushing her into her room. 

She wants it to be slow, to be beautiful like it’s been in her memories and in her dreams. Desperation claims them, and all wishes for tenderness seem to go flying off with inhibition. Helena’s got her pinned, pressed flush against the wall, fingers in her hair and Myka’s barely got time to figure out what she feels before her mind explodes and her body seems weightless.

“I…” she starts, her tongue is like sandpaper in her mouth and she wants to tell Helena that this is everything she’s ever wanted. She wants to tell her that she’s seen her alive and dead all across the span of time and that she’s the most beautiful soul Myka’s ever had the fortune to meet. 

Her mind spins poetry as Helena kisses her, and she finds that she can see the filaments of the reality of this now. She sucks Helena’s tongue into her mouth and holds it there, kissing for all she’s worth, her fingers touching a body she’s never really ever allowed herself to more than shyly steal glances of from afar.

Helena is thin, far too thin really, and Myka lets her direct how this is going. This is the dawn of their life together, and Myka has seen its future. It is a glorious one.

“We could never have a moment like this again,” Helena murmurs as she pulls away, her words hot and thick against Myka’s ear. She wants to curl around them, linger there, her mind well-past made up that this will be far from the last moment like this. “Does that bother you?”

She shakes her head no and Helena’s smile is wide and grateful. She is no longer the broken human being that she maybe was, in that time before. Maybe time away has finally healed her.

“Let me have this moment,” Myka says, and pulls Helena down to her once more.

They fall asleep as the sun crests over the bluff that marks the town line of Univille, and Myka feels content with her life for what feels like the first time in ages. The day will bring new pain, but that is for tomorrow to have.

They’ve learned something about themselves today, but learning always feels like loss at first.

Myka smiles slowly, and wraps her arm around the wisest woman she knows. Time isn’t on their side just yet, but soon it will come.


	23. Myka is 30, Helena is 28 and 34

When they take Helena away, Myka does not look at her. Their parting was fated to be this way, and it doesn’t make it hurt any less to have the pain of it hit her full in the throat as Helena’s lips brush against her forehead.  She is choking on the emotion and the pain of it all “Stay strong,” Helena whispers.  “The train leaves at two, avoid 63rd and Wallace.”

There is a beat then, where Myka is trying to figure out what Helena’s saying. The words linger in her brain and stay put there, muddled up and backwards as Mrs. Frederic takes Helena in her borrowed jacket and shirt, and leads her from the bed and breakfast.

Leena has come down to watch them go as well, her eyes lingering on the small of Mrs. Frederic’s back as the door swings shut behind her.  Myka turns to glance at her, watching as the troubled expression seems to grow across Leena’s face.  “Something is very wrong.”

And Myka nods, because there is little else she can do.  Leena is perceptive enough in such situations to know that Myka knows how this plays out (even if she doesn’t) and that she shouldn’t press.  She’s grateful, because Pete would probably have asked her and Claudia - well, had this been any other time - Claudia would infer things from her silence. 

They go to breakfast together.  Pete’s actually eating Wheaties which is somehow oddly hilarious to Myka that she fails to notice that there’s a dark expression on his face and he keeps glancing in the direction of where Claudia’s sitting, the metronome still clutched in her lap.  She’s staring forlornly out at the bluff beside the bed and breakfast, her fingers stroking idly at the metronome’s wooden casing. 

Myka gets it, she really does.  She understands that Steve filled a void for Claudia that Joshua could not fill.  She understands that she can never fill that void, and she knows that Claudia will never accept anything less than Steve back to solve this conundrum.  She knows that this is no different than how she feels about Helena.  There’s a void there that she cannot escape.  They’re all empty.

“Sixty-third and Wallace…” she mutters to herself.  The address sounds familiar, and she’s racking her brain, trying to figure out why it sounds so familiar.  It’s nothing in literature, or she’d remember it.  No, this is from her academy days - something that she can’t quite recall now, but something that Helena deemed important to tell her.

Pete slurps down some Wheaties and points at her with her spoon, “Wasn’t that a serial killer’s address?”  They’re years out of the academy now, and neither she nor Pete really follows that line of professional interest very much anymore.  They hardly get the type as members of the Secret Service, and even less so, now that they’re working with artifacts, not treasury issues.

Myka thinks about it for a moment, because she honestly can’t remember.  It’s been so long now, and she can’t imagine why Helena would tell her something like that.  She’s never been much interested in serial killers, that was far more of an FBI sort of an interest anyway.  She had wanted to work in a mint, or to protect the president.  She hadn’t wanted to see a lot of killing. She saw enough of it in her nightmares. 

“It was,” comes Claudia’s voice.  “During the Chicago World’s Fair right?”  She looked actually interested, so Myka rolls with it, anything to keep her in the present and now dwelling on the impossible. 

But Myka’s thinking now, thinking about a conversation what feels like years ago.  A conversation where Helena had done something very strange, where she’d bragged to Myka that she’d managed to convince a certain inventor to hand over his technology to the warehouse. And she’d done it at the Chicago World’s Fair.  Her mouth falls open and Pete blinks up at her with a questioning look on his face.  Myka wants to speak, and opens her mouth to do so. 

The world fades to black.

She wasn’t fast enough and the darkness takes her. Pete will hopefully understand and Myka prays to all the gods that she doesn’t believe in that she’s not about to wake up in 1893 even though she knows that Helena wouldn’t have told her the detail if it wasn’t the case.

All she can wonder is why, and hope that the trip doesn’t take that long.  Doctor Calder has a theory that the trips do take something out of her, but it is not something that can be casually measured.  She’s sat for test after test as the good doctor attempts to decipher the mess of her genome.  There’s a mutation there, but like most mutations, it will probably kill her sooner rather than later.

Myka has been at peace with this fact for much of her adult life.

She wakes up in a whorehouse.  Or at least what smells like one. The stench of piss and sex and sweat clings to the air in the room she’s in, sitting slumped over a desk, the rough wood of a chair biting into her skin as she shifts her body forward. 

Her fingers meet glass - potentially a bottle, and she grabs it clumsily.  She can’t tell what’s inside it, but tilts it back and forth in the light.  It’s not water, she probably shouldn’t drink it.  Being drunk in the past is something that she’s experimented with once, sitting in her father’s study, watching herself sleeping in a bassinette.  He kept good scotch in the bottom drawer of his desk, and Myka’s known where the key is kept since forever. 

She had sat in the dark and watched herself sleep, glass cradled in her hands.  She had been thirty at that point.  Sam had just come into her life and she had been so impossibly confused by what he could possibly mean to her.

God, it felt like a lifetime ago.

There’s a disgusting-looking man sleeping on the bed beside her, and a pair of discarded pants and boots that fit her pretty well.  She pulls them on and rummages under the bed until she finds a woman’s under garment that might be a corset but its cut in such a way that it’s easier to call it some sort of secondary breast-control device.  Myka’s never seen something like this before, and she stares at it for a long moment before attempting to figure out how to put it on. 

The guy grunts and rolls over, causing Myka to start.  She stares down at herself.  She doesn’t quite look the part, but in the dresser drawer there’s a clean shirt still in its Sears, Roebuck & Co. packaging and she pauses, ever so slightly, marveling at the price and the packaging. She’s destroying a piece of history that isn’t history at this time.  It’s new and she’s nervous about doing it anyway. 

But necessity wins out and Myka shoves her arms into the shirt sleeves and picks up the man’s cap.  It smells of sweat and dirty hair, but she turns it over in the light from the half-parted window and doesn’t see any lice.  She jams it onto her head and tucks her hair up and under it.  It’ll be easier, she reasons, to be a boy.

She takes the man’s jacket and opens the door slowly, facing a long hallway and then a set of stairs.  She pulls the cap down low over her eyes, jams her hands in the man’s pockets, and heads towards the stairs. There’s a wallet in there, and she doesn’t dare look at it yet.  At least she’s got some form of identification and maybe even money, she reasons.  It’s a blessing these trips don’t often have.

No one, thankfully, bothers her as she moves through the hotel.  Her initial estimation of the place was wrong.  She just was placed, for some bizarre reason, in the room of a man she could very easily pilfer clothing from.

She bites her lip. 

When she had been much younger than this, she’d drifted this far backwards in time.  She doesn’t need to steal a glance at the newspaper a gentleman is reading in the lobby to know that this is Chicago at the height of the Columbian Exhibition, and that she needs to be careful.  There’s at least one serial killer running amuck, maybe two. 

Still, she wants to see where he’d done it, but Helena’s warning rings sharp and true in her ears.  She walks up the road and towards a police constable.  She figures that she can trouble him for directions.

When she was younger, she’d fallen far too far forward in time, and seen Helena as the years took her.  She’d been dead when she got there, and she’d known it.  That trip hadn’t been very long, but it echoed long enough for her to know that she would linger if it was necessary to do so.

Chicago is a growing city at this time.  It’s full of immigrants and corruption.  The mob is well established and pervasive.  The people here are already what they will become later, tough and hard-nosed.  Myka’s trying not to look around with awe on her face; she doesn’t want to seem like a tourist, not when she’s looking for who will be a stranger on a train.

There’s a clock mounted at the center of the square she’s come across, stating that it’s nearly one o’clock.  She has to hurry.  Her pace quickens and she turns down one street and then another.  She feels helplessly lost.  She’s never spent a lot of time in this city, and doesn’t know it well enough historically to pick out landmarks. 

She’s not paying attention and is looking for someone who might be friendly enough to direct her towards the train station when she nearly bowls a woman over.  “So sorry,” she says, and offers her hand and helps the unsteady woman to her feet. 

“You should watch where you’re going,” comes a painfully familiar voice, and Myka turns, her face an expression of all the fears she’s ever had of breaking the timeline.  Myka tips her hat to the woman and turns to face what is sure to be her doom. 

“Head in the clouds,” Myka says, gesturing towards the sky with what she hopes is a charming smile.

Helena … Helena is young.  She is exceptionally innocent looking.  She’s playing the part of a tourist well, but Myka can see the tenseness in her muscles.  She’s on edge here as well.

Christina isn’t dead yet. 

“I can see that,” Helena chuckles and Myka knows that every second this conversation lingers, things are changing.  They must be.  Helena wouldn’t lie about not knowing her, not to her face and more than a century from now.  It doesn’t seem possible.  “Are you headed for somewhere in particular, Mr. Head-in-the-Clouds?”

“The station,” Myka admits with a sigh.  “I got turned around - I’m … not from here.”

“Neither am I, but I have the good sense to ask for directions before I leave my hotel,” Helena loops her arm around Myka’s and Myka can’t help but wonder if Helena really thinks she’s a man.  When their heads are so close together that Myka can smell the perfume that Helena’s wearing, Helena adds in a hushed undertone.  “You’d do to be careful, sir, haven’t you read the papers? People are disappearing, they say the devil’s in this city.”

Myka gulps, suddenly thinking of the time and the place and the only possible serial killer that could be running loose in this place.  “Holmes…” she breathes, and her hand catches over her mouth.

“I had guessed,” Helena replies, and her expression again turns light.  “Come, I will lead you to the station.  I have a two o’clock train.”

“I’m… er…”  Myka begins, but then falters.  She doesn’t know why Helena wanted her at the train station, but she’ll go alone with it.  She’s never been particular good at lying on her feet, and lying to Helena is hard for many other reasons.  She’s already sworn to herself that she will never lie to Helena, and yet she is.  It comes so easily, in this breath she can expel it to know that the future will be safe.  “I have to meet my uncle.”

“Is he odd like you?”  Helena glances down at Myka’s clothes. “Dressing like a woman?” Myka flushes and Helena just smiles.  “Come now, you trust me to not spoil your secret, don’t you?”

Myka has never been a good actress, but the lies flow easily for her now.  She lets Helena lead her down one street and then the next, winding a circuitous route towards the station.  It is strange to play this role for Helena, the escort that Myka knows that she needs in order to pass unnoticed through the streets here.  The world is not quite so advanced that they could avoid this, and she doesn’t really mind talking to Helena now.  She’s very fascinating  if closed-off and entirely too-calculating.

As the turn down one final street, Myka points to the sky.  There’s a large plume of soot and smoke rising from a building in the distance.  As they approach  they see more of it.  ”Guess that’s our destination,” she says.

Helena taps her chin with a gloved finger before she says, “You never told me your name.”

She stops cold in her tracks and swallows her name with all the will-power that she’s able to muster.  “I’m sure you’ll understand that I cannot tell you that.”  She watches Helena carefully in that moment, because she’s just judiciously bowed out of a perfectly reasonable question.  She knows that Helena’s mind is working overtime, and Myka desperately wishes that her moment to vanish would be now.  She’s not sure that she can handle Helena if she gets curious.  She knows that being well, and she knows she is right to fear it.  The power that lurks just underneath the quizzical look that Helena has on her face is clear as day.  Myka worries at her lip and opens to her mouth to add that she’s really sorry but she’s not in a position to share her identity, when Helena cuts her off.

“If you are disinclined to tell me, that must mean that you have something to hide, more than the fact that you are, indeed, a woman,” She’s got this manic grin on her face and Myka wants to back away slowly, her hands jammed into her pockets and looking for all the world like a lost schoolboy.  There’s no way that she can stop this train of thought now that it’s started. She knows Helena well enough to know that.

“I’m not from here-” she blurts out, and her hand flies to cover her mouth in horror.  She knows her own rules backwards and forwards, but as far as she knows, this never happened.  Helena had told her in her own future that after she’d gone back when Helena was a child, there were no more trips this far back.  

“Beg pardon?” Helena says, and Myka’s on the verge of telling her everything when she feels her stomach start to heave and she pitches forward into Helena’s arms. She doesn’t remember if she passes through them or circumvents them completely fading into nothingness.

She supposes that Helena wouldn’t consider this encounter anything other than an extraordinary event until she learned the details of Myka’s mutation   She supposes that this is her saving grace.  She doesn’t break her rules and Helena still was telling the truth all those years from now.

And when she wakes up in the middle of her bedroom floor, face down on the rug there, she sobs for the innocence that she saw in Helena Wells. 

 

 **note:** The research was left intentionally vague for sections of this story, as I wanted to really recreate the feel of arriving, out of time in a strange city.  So please, native Chicago-ians, do not fault me for the vague descriptions.


	24. Myka is 15

When Myka is just-fifteen, her body gangly and her head full of questions about herself.  No one has the answers that she wants or needs and she craves more knowledge than what she is given.  It is all so impossibly strange and she hates it.  She is not normal, that much her father makes a point of telling her nearly every day.

She hates it, hates how she moves through time and space as though it’s nothing.  She doesn’t even know what the point of it all is.  She can’t control it, and what’s the point of a super power if you cannot control it?  She’s just a freak.

She’s drowning in self-loathing.  Tracy is the apple of her father’s eye, and she’s just the first born.  The son-that-was-not. 

The bookstore is Bering & Sons. 

She is not the son, she can never be that person for her father, and she hates how he looks at her with pity. She knows that he hates who she is and what she is.

She’s sitting in her favorite place in the world, a copy of Ordinary People open across her knees.  Her father doesn’t like her reading here, in sequestered deep within the bookstore.  He thinks that she’s a detriment to the atmosphere, curled up in her reading nook, humming contentedly to herself as she turns the pages of yet another life that is far more exciting than her own.

She wonders if her father is like Beth, if he is so desperate for normalness to return to his family that he’s treating her as if she’s died.  She bites her lip and tucks her bookmark into her book.  She’d hate for Tracy to have to play Conrad’s role - even if the whole thing is stupid because she’s alive and not dead of a sailing accident. 

Her doctors watch her closely, but there is no treatment besides preparedness.  They think that as her childhood winds down that she’ll spend less time in the far distant past, but Myka knows better to believe them.  There is no predicting how her body will react at any given moment.  It’s only gotten worse since her period started and her breasts suddenly appeared.  She’s still too-tall and gangly, but she’s finally starting to feel like she could grow to be comfortable in her mutated body.

Yet every time she starts to feel assured, she finds herself tipping backwards into self-doubt.  When the men in her grade look at her as though she’s a piece of meat, when the girls cut her down for having curly hair, for looking too JAP-y to not be Jewish.  She hates them all, and can’t wait to leave this place.

She’ll show them.

Maybe it’s because she’s figured out her stresses that she’s able to travel more at will at this time in her life.  She’s told herself to cherish these years, because they won’t last but a few precious seconds in the big scheme of things.  There’s a woosh of air, and she is suddenly somewhere else.

The room with the bronze statues has become her sanctuary over the years, but the blanket is not in the corner where it usually is and she finds herself panicking.  She has no idea what year it is, even if the room is full of the same sort of quite energy is always.  She can’t place it and it sets her on edge.

She shivers in the cold and steps forward.  She’s never been left alone here long enough to actually have a chance to look around.  She wants to know what the purpose of the hulking machine that stands a solitary guardian to this fortress of solitude.

Myka’s cheeks burn at the reference.  She’s trying to not give herself away at school, but she loves science fiction and fantasy.  H.G. Wells is by far her favorite author, but she’s growing to love Clarke and Bradbury and all the others.  Maybe she should stop reading comic books, but she can’t help it.  The universes that they create are just too fascinating, and the heroes are just like her. 

She thinks of Wells’ books, of how a place like this would have fascinated him, and rests her fingers on the solid steel door of the machine.

There are no controls.  She can’t imagine how it works.

“You shouldn’t be here,” comes a voice solid and powerful across the room. 

Myka just about jumps out of her skin and nearly trips over her too-big feet as she spins to come face to face with the one person she can honestly say she never expected to encounter in a place like this.  Her doctor, the terrifying woman with her hair coiled tight atop her head, stands with her hands on her hips and wearing very dated clothing. 

“Doct-” she begins, fumbling for words as the doctor crosses the room in several long strides.  She looks far younger in this time and almost-uncomfortable as she strips off her jacket and passes it over to Myka. 

“Thanks,” Myka says, and pulls the jacket on.  It’s scratchy and far too big for her as her body currently resembles a beanpole with breasts.  She shifts awkwardly from foot to foot and tries to smile.  It hurts her face and she can’t help but think that she’s somehow done something wrong.

(It might have something to do with the disapproving stare she’s currently receiving.)

“It is not often that we get visitors in this place,” Doctor Frederic says, her arms folding tightly across her chest.  She looks positively ferocious and Myka swallows nervously.  She’s never seen her doctor like this and it’s making her even more paranoid than usual.  “And even less often that they come unannounced.”

“My name is —” Myka begins, but Doctor Frederic holds up a hand and stops her.

“I do not know when you are from, child, but it is probably for the best that you do not tell me many details about yourself.  I’m sure that they will come in time.”  Doctor Frederic glances around at the room and her gaze levels on one of the statues in particular.  It’s one that Myka recognizes well, and she smiles fondly at it, following Doctor Frederic’s eyes.  “Your life is connected to something here.  I don’t know if it’s in this room or within these walls, but you’re drawn here.”

Myka nods.  “I come here a lot.  I like the statues.  They’re nice to be around.”

Doctor Frederic’s face hardens and she stares around the room for a long moment, taking in the status as if she is weighing what she knows of them against Myka’s assertion that she likes them.  It is strange for Myka, to have an adult consider her opinion so carefully. 

“One day you will pick a timeline and stick to it, I think,” her doctor announces at length, and Myka is trembling in the cold of the room.  The borrowed jacket does nothing for her and she’s looking outwards and inwards all at once.

It’s no surprise when she vanishes.

Her father is shaking her when she wakes up, and he hands her the book she’s reading wordlessly.

Maybe he’s more like Mr. Bennet than Conrad’s mother, but he is still not an easy man for Myka to love.


	25. Myka is 30

When Claudia first starts to entertain the idea of actually bringing Steve back, Myka bites her tongue and says nothing.  It is not her place.  Steve is the love of Claudia’s life, despite the fact that they do not yet know this.  He is her best friend, her brother and the one person that she cares for more than anyone else in the world. 

When Claudia steals back the metronome from the Regents, Myka holds her tongue.  She thinks it’s a foolish idea, and that Claudia is dooming herself to whatever consequences this artifact carries.  She’s maybe a fool for not saying anything sooner, but the future is unknown to her as it to everyone else.  She doesn’t know what’s going to happen here and now. She does not follow the Warehouse’s timeline.

It is not until she is sitting across from Mrs. Frederic and Steve himself that she actually allows herself to voice her opinion.  Myka folds her arms across her chest and demands to know what Mrs. Frederic is thinking.  “We’re not gods,” she says, throwing her hand up in the air in what she supposes is a grand gesture.  “We can’t play around with the dead.”

Steve looks sheepish, hand splayed out across the back of his neck.  Myka feels bad for saying what she has.  It isn’t his choice to be alive again, and it certainly was not his choice to die.  He is just a bystander to Myka’s indignation at the hypocrisy of them all.

If it had been Helena who had died, Myka knows that she would have stopped at nothing to save her.  Myka knows even now that she would go to the end of the earth if it meant even five more stolen minutes with Helena in this time - their time.  They’re both coming to a time when they can look at each other in the eye and understand, once and for all, that this was their future and their present.

The problem is that she is almost positive that they would stop her.  She knows that Pete still isn’t quite sold on Helena, and that Claudia will do what she’s told if it means preserving the one home she’s ever had.  Myka hates that Steve is allowed to return, when Helena is still sent away.

Mrs. Frederic’s hair is streaked white, all the more indication that she - and the Warehouse with her - is deeply scarred by what Artie did.  She looks at Myka severely over her glasses and shakes her head.  “It was a wrong that could not be corrected with the circumstances as they were.”  There’s a warning in her tone, and Myka can recognize it well.  She’s heard what Helena thinks, and knows that Myka will always know. 

Myka sighs and stands up. “It’s good to have you back, Steve.”  She nods to Mrs. Frederic and leaves the room.  Claudia and Pete are lurking just outside the door and Pete follows Myka out into the kitchen as Mrs. Frederic calls Claudia into the living room.  

  
There’s a box of twizzlers in the freezer, she’s starting to find that she likes them chilled, and Myka’s making a b-line for them.  “I take it what happened is really bad?” Pete asks, leaning against Leena’s counter and watching as Myka selects three twizzlers and sets the box back in the freezer, shoving a bag of peas over it to obscure it from view.  This is something that she can control, something she understands and something that will never change.

Pete really should know better than to ask, but Myka just smiles weakly.  “HG… she had a theory,” and she won’t say more because he’s phishing and he really shouldn’t be.

“I had wondered - Artie was arguing pretty hard for her.”  Pete reaches for one of Myka’s twizzlers but she slaps his hand away.  She’s having a moment of weakness, she doesn’t need him intruding into it by stealing her food. 

“You know I can’t say anything,” she says to Pete, because Pete is her rock.  She never sees him when she displaces, but sometimes she wishes that she would.  He intrigues her endlessly, and he’s easily the best friend that she’s ever had. 

“I know,” Pete says as he nods his head.  “But the more I think about it, I think she might be right.”

Myka says nothing, for the rules are keeping her silent.  Something is not right here and it has nothing to do with Steve or with Claudia or even Mrs. Frederic.  No, this is something far more sinister and far more uncomfortable.

She heads upstairs after the minutes seem to stretch onwards into what feels like forever.  Steve is standing by her door, his hand poised as if to knock.

The gesture is wordless, but she brushes by him and opens the door to him.  He’s an outsider, and when she sits down on her bed and says, “I can’t tell you anything.”

Steve just nods and sits quietly beside her.  “I heard that HG Wells saved the day - again.”

She laughs, and it feels good.  “I guess she did.”

“You guys ever get a chance to talk?” Steve has been privy to a more than a few nights when Myka has lost what little semblance of control she’s managed to project.  She’s sobbed into his shoulder, despite the fact that he’s a virtual stranger, on more than one occasion.  Myka thinks that it’s because she cannot lie to him, that she’s turned to him over Pete. 

“We did,” she whispers.  “I think I’m gay.”

Steve smiles, slow and easy.  “You’re jumping right past bisexual?  They do exist, you know.”

Myka just shrugs, because it just feels right.  “I think so.”  She looks away.  “I think I’ve been in love with her since I was eight years old.”

“What happened when you were eight?”  Steve asks.

“I met her, and my father read me  _The Time Machine_.”


	26. Myka is 8, Helena is 49

Her father sends her to her room and Myka wants to scream at him.  Shout until her lungs give out that it’s not her fault.  She didn’t know what would happen when she disappeared. She didn’t know that she’d wake up in a park naked and confused.  She didn’t know that the police would ask questions and schedule visits with the scary ladies from whatever CPS means.  

She screws up her eyes and tries to make herself disappear.  She has no idea how this works, no idea how she manages to meander so easily across time, and she almost wants to say that she hates it. She hates waking up in strange places and running for her life.  She’s naked, alone, cold and frightened; always.  

But she’s mad at her father, and this is the only way she knows to make her point clear.

Myka lies on her back in her bed for three hours, counting the seconds until it happens.  

When it finally does, it jerks at her navel and pulls her backwards and forwards all at once.  It’s like a hook has caught her around the middle and has pulled in her through a hole in time so small that her body is almost crushed in the process.  She’s never thought of her travels as painful, but Myka knows that they are.

She wakes up in a field behind a low house painted a deep red and accented with gray stone.  It looks like the sort of place that Anne of Green Gables would live and Myka smiles and looks around for clothes. There’s laundry hanging out on a series of lines behind the house, and Myka sneaks her way forward and steals a shirt and a pair of pants that look to be around her size.  They at least are made of denim.

The woman with the beehive on her head had warned Myka when she first met her to look to the clothing first to determine when she was.  She’d given Myka an illustrated book of men’s and women’s fashion over the ages and told her to study it.  “This will be your key,” she had said with an almost dangerous smile, before she’d made sure to impress upon Myka how important it was that if she felt as though she was stuck in a particular time to find a place to hide and stay there until her body sent her home once more.

These are pants that Myka does not recognize, and the shirt is made of material called smart wool as per the label on the neck.  Myka has never heard of smart wool, and wonders if she’s come to the future instead of the past.  She pulls the shirt on over her head and winces as it’s still a bit damp. 

She’s only eight years old, and she knows that she should be hiding, not exploring.  But if this is the future than she’s no better than Wells’ time traveler and she wants to see what the locals are like.  She might get to see a ray gun or something too, which would be super cool and Tracy is sure to be jealous.

The house all in red wood and gray stone stands at the end of a dirt road, all by it’s lonesome.  It is quaint looking, an old farmhouse with a barn out back.  There are no chickens or cows though, and Myka is disappointed because somehow the lack of chickens makes it far less like the Cuthbert’s house as Myka imagined it.  She scowls and steals towards the doors.

There is a little girl playing in the doorway.  She has dark, curly hair like Myka’s, but her eyes are brown and very somber.  Myka stares at her as she moves her doll through the dust of the driveway, singing quietly under her breath as she does so.  She can’t be that much younger than Tracy, Myka reasons.  Maybe four, maybe three.

“Hi,” she says.

The little girl looks up at Myka and promptly stops singing and begins to cry.  Myka wishes that she wouldn’t, because she’s not prepared to handle a crying child.  Tracy’s just moved the point where she doesn’t do it constantly and Myka’s really been enjoying the peace and quiet.  She tries to shush the child, but then she hears an amused chuckle from the steps of the large front porch.

“You are very out of time, Ms. Bering,” an amused voice says, and Myka squints into the shade.  The brilliant sunlight of this place is almost blinding.  Myka wants to stay in a place like this someday in her life.  It’s brilliant and it’s beautiful.  She likes it.

She stares at the child before her and then gives a small shrug as a figure moves from the screen door to come into the sunlight.  She’s older, as old as Myka’s teacher, Mrs. Sanders, and she talks like the ladies do on Masterpiece Theatre.  Myka has seen this woman before and she smiles.  “I might be,” she says.  Her doctor and the woman with the beehive has always told her to be vague about who she is.

“You scared Evelynn,” the woman laughs.  She scoops the child up into her arms and presses a kiss to her forehead.  “And Evelynn knows better than to be scared of Myka, right?”

“How do you know my name?” Myka asks, her hands clenched into fists.  She’s been told to never tell her name to anyone, even someone who looks like her. She’s been told that it could spell her doom or even worse.  She’s been told a lot of things.

She’s not sure what she believes anymore.

She’s only eight, after all.

Myka bites her lip as the woman offers her a hand.  Her other hand is full of the child named Evelynn.  She steps forward and takes it and the uneasy feeling that’s been lurking at the base of her stomach seems to dissipate.  She feels safer than she’s felt on these trips in many years, and she finds herself relaxing as she’s lead into the house.

The woman makes her lemonade and hands Evelynn a bowl of what looks like cheerios.  Evelynn proceeds to throw them all over the wide and airy kitchen.

“This isn’t nothing like Anne’s house,” Myka comments, sipping her lemonade.

“That’s because this is Wyoming, not Prince Edward Island,” the woman replies, and Myka finds herself grinning.  Wyoming sounds plenty exotic to her, because the furthest she’s ever been away from home is Denver to visit her uncle. 

“Wicked…” she breathes, and dodges the cheerio that Evelynn throws in her direction.

The woman smiles and asks a question that Myka does not quite here the answer to as she feels like someone’s grabbed her by the navel and is pulling her back through that worm hole once more.  She lands in a heap on her bed and sees that it’s two in the morning.  She’s been gone for hours and she can’t help but wonder if anyone noticed.


	27. Myka is 37 and 50

Helena hates marriage.  She tells Myka that it is an institution created to oppress women and deny them the control that they are given the right to possess over their lives.  She rails against it when Myka finds herself reading articles about the brave men and women who are daring to celebrate their unions in a political climate still charged with the othering idea that somehow, homosexuality is abnormal.  Myka does not know what to say to a woman brave enough to have a child out of wedlock in Victorian England on the subject.

And the ring is burning a hole in her pocket.

She spends a lot of time in the depths of the Warehouse these days, just thinking.  Life is so different now, different than what it had been.  Time seems to stretch on forever in this place and have no effect at all - and the hours of her life tick away effortlessly.  There is never just one threat to the Warehouse anymore, there never really was just one to begin with.

But Myka is alone here, and it is here that she can chew Doctor Calder’s pills and keep herself grounded as she tries to avoid the most important decision of her life.

She’s worried that Helena will say no, because belief is something that Helena holds fiercely to herself and guards closely.  Her beliefs, Myka reasons, keep her sane despite what she has seen. 

She’s standing in the Bronze Sector, surrounded by that god-awful machine’s creations, embracing the quiet.  The quiet has always been there for here when nothing else has been.  She chews on her lip and holds the little box in her outstretched hand.  It all seems so simple in this moment.

Helena is sure to say no.

“She won’t answer you if you just stand there and worry about it,” comes a voice from the other side of the room.  They keep a blanket there, tucked away in a box in the corner, and Myka finds that she needs it more often than not.  She’s wearing it now, wrapped around tired and slumped shoulders, her expression world weary.

She looks old.  Older than she did when she got on the wrong end of Man Ray’s camera, but she knows that this face cannot be that old.  “Hi,” she says, and tucks the ring into her pocket. 

“Hello,” she answers herself.  Myka moves to make room for herself on the steps of the bronzer, and settles down to sit and wait out this displacement with her. 

They sit in silence for a few long and pregnant women, before Myka dares ask.  “Does she say yes?”

“You know,” comes the response.  “You’ve already been there.”

Myka supposes that she has.  She’s never thought of that stolen moment that way, but she has been to that place in time, not far from now.  An island off Cape Cod.

A safe heaven.

“When are you from?” Myka wonders. 

“I am fifty, so… thirteen or so years out of time?”  Comes the reply, and Myka’s breath catches in her throat.  So young to look so old.  What could possibly be wrong with her?

“I’m dying - you don’t need to ask.”

“Why?”  It is the age-old question, the one that’s plagued her since birth.  Why is she the way that she is?  Why is she here, in this time, in this place?  Why does any of this happen?

Herself in thirteen years shifts uncomfortably under her blanket, her hands resting on her knees stretched out before her.  “The displacement is rough… on a person’s body.  That’s what the doctors tell me.  There are ways to slow it, yes, but its path is still inevitable.”

“Do you know how long?”  Myka asks.

She smiles at herself, wizened and far wiser.  “You know it doesn’t work that way.”  There’s a set of rules that cannot be broken between them, no matter how desperately they want to share what they know.  Backwards and forwards – time is not linear for Myka Bering.  She knows that that is Helena’s influence, rather than her own genetic mutation, and yet still she tries to control it. 

Myka bites her lip and looks down.  There are questions that she must ask but knows that she cannot. She has to think of something else.  She should talk about anything else, really.  The ring is still burning a hole in Myka’s pocket and she takes it out.  The little box that holds her future captured in a beautiful moment in time. 

“Will she say yes?”  Myka turns to herself, her eyes wide with disbelief. Surely this old woman remembers the conversations they’ve had on the subject and how powerful that belief is in Helena.  Myka looks down at the ring box in her hands.  “She doesn’t believe in it.”

“She believes in you,” comes the reply.  “And that is enough.”


	28. Myka is 27 and 37

There are times when Myka knows that it is not Sam that she loves.  She sits with him, their fingers tangled together, and wonders who it is who is that she displaces to see.  Sam is the same that he’s always been, kind and encouraging.  He loves her when no one else will - when no one else  _can_.

Myka has become used to people not wanting to love her because she is so odd.  She displaces across time and space and knows the future and the past so intimately - and yet not at all.  It is as though her knowledge comes through a sieve and she only has the barest glimpses of information from beyond the haze of time.

Her doctor, the terrifying woman with the tight knot of cornrows done up into a severe up-do who has not aged a day since Myka had first started seeing when she was five years old, tells her that her knowledge is hers and hers alone. She cannot protect herself or the very future of the timeline she walks so precariously upon if she shares the secrets of the future.  She cannot have a future if she does this.  She understands her doctor, and trusts her implicitly.

The woman holds the answers to the gates of time in the palm of her hand and Myka is a mere tool for her.

“Hey,” she says, resting her forehead on Sam’s shoulder.  She’s not sure how to tell him that she’s a time traveler without a machine.  The key lies within herself, her doctor had told her.  The responsibility of the future lies with her decisions.  She can tell who she wishes.  That is not the problem. 

No, the problem lies in the reaction.

“Mnnn?”  Sam is tired.  They both are.  They’ve been going non-stop for close to two weeks now, and Sam’s divorce lawyer has been calling him non-stop with regards to the mortgage and the hearings that are going to start within the next month or so.  Myka is excited for them, because it will mean that they will finally be together.  This is the final barrier – the last secret that she’s left to tell. 

Myka curls her legs up underneath her and looks at Sam – truly looks at him.  He is nothing like the woman that Myka sees when she displaces.  He is nothing like anyone from Myka’s past or future, but in the now, Sam is all that Myka wants.  She tilts her head to the side and asks, “You know how I take pills like candy?”  He’s complained about it a lot, actually. He’s worried for Myka’s liver and how her body is going to stop being able to actually process the medicine someday. 

He nods and flashes a sad smile at Myka,  “You gotta stop doing that.” He shakes his head then, running a tired hand through his hair.  “You’re going to get sick for real one of these days, sport.”

She bites her lip, because it’s maybe half the truth already.  “I… have a condition – they’re not Advil or pain meds. I’ve gotten used to saying that they are.  It’s just easier, after all these years, to not say.”

Sam looks concerned, taking in Myka in her half-naked state, sitting on his bed with the sheet tangled around her legs.  Myka shifts under his gaze, feeling uncomfortable with the scrutiny.  Her body feels almost alien; it is so grounded in the present moment.  She’s always felt like time was a fleeting thing, given her relationship with it – but this is different, it is more powerful and wholly terrifying.  She’s rooted here, and she will not leave until she tells the truth.  “What do you mean a condition?” Sam asks.

Closing her eyes, Myka starts at the beginning.  It is a strange story to tell, of how she would wake up in different places, cold and alone.  She tells Sam of the room full of statues and how they are so warm and so kind – and yet so dreadfully terrifying.  She tells him of her first meeting with Doctor Frederic at age five and how they’d been working to find a cure since that initial meeting.  She tells him of how she’s travelled what feels like ages, backwards and forwards in time.  And in the end, Myka explains the theory that she’s following a timeline that is not her own.

He is quiet for a long time after that, fingers twisting the sheets between them into knots.  Myka wants to reach out and touch him, but she does not dare.

“So you’re a time traveler?”

Myka shrugs, “After a fashion.  I call the trips displacement, as they so rarely last longer than a few moments.  My body simply is not rooted in the here and the now the way that most people are.”

“I feel like I’ve walked into a science fiction novel,” Sam mutters and runs a hand over his face.  Myka feels a shift in the room then, and he stands hurriedly, and pulls on his pants.  He tucks his shirt into them with hurried and scared-seeming motions and Myka feels her stomach drop, just thinking about what it could all mean.  “Look, Myka.” He stops, hands reaching for his keys and panic in his eyes to match what Myka feels at the pit of her stomach.  “I just… I need to digest this.  I’m not mad, please don’t think that I am – but I need some space. To figure out what this all means.”

He walks out the door and Myka crumples.  Her future is hanging in the balance between a man who doesn’t know what it all means and her own fears that he is not actually the one who is meant to know.

She feels the other presence in the room, as well.  The door in the kitchen closes and Myka hears the lock click before she says, “When are you from?”

Her face peers around the closet door, wearing a bathrobe and a solemn expression that makes her look years older.  She can’t be that much older, though.  Myka thinks maybe five years from now, certainly no more than ten.  “Ten or so years,” Myka tells herself and Myka has to admit that she’s a little impressed. She’d never anticipated aging so well.  It’s almost… nice to see.  “I’d forgotten how awful that was.”

She sits on the edge of the bed and Myka supposes that she should make some sort of an effort to cover herself up.  “Did you ever get the feeling that he wasn’t the right person?”  Myka stares down at her hands and then looks up at her older self.  “Doctor Frederic says that I will pick someone’s timeline and follow it.  I never follow Sam.”

She doesn’t answer herself and Myka knows that it’s the sort of question that goes against the rules.  “I see,” she whispers in confirmation.  “Who is that woman?”

“A future,” Myka explains to herself.  “And a past all rolled into one.  Her life spans centuries.”

“I’m not gay,” the reply comes almost instantly. And then she adds as the afterthought she’s always wondered about.  “How is that even possible?”

Myka looks at herself for a long moment, her eyes far sadder than Myka has ever recalled seeing them.  “No one ever said you were.”  And she’s gone — a crumpled robe all that’s left of that vision of Myka’s future.  It’s strange to see herself so out of time, but this is a critical juncture, an important moment. 

And Myka’s got to find Sam.

She scrambles out of bed and rummages around on the floor for her underwear.  She’s got to tell him that it’s okay if he’s not okay with this. Myka’s used to disappointment.  She usually knows how things turn out.

Out into the Denver cold she goes, chasing a future that might not actually exist.

 


	29. Myka is 31

Time passes differently for Myka, and when she grows in age, it hardly seemed to make much sense to her anymore.  Artie sends her with Steve to New Orleans and they’re working together for what feels like the first time ever.  Myka doesn’t know Steve very well.  He belongs to Claudia in the same way that Helena belongs to Myka.  There are barriers that cannot be crossed.

She knows that she’s spiraling downwards once again.  Maybe it’s because she’s seen the end and know that it won’t come gently.  Maybe it’s because she still remembers the little girl she met all those years ago.  There is a future in all this, she knows it.

After they’ve solved the case and the artifact is successfully neutralized and packed up in Myka’s briefcase, Steve offers her a beer.

Myka doesn’t drink that much because of Pete, and she’s almost tempted to say no to Steve.  He gives her this look, like he wants to talk, though, and Myka knows that she should go.

Steve is like her in a lot of ways.

They’re the same sort of person, cast in a different mold, but they do reflect each other. 

“Do you ever think about your sister?” Myka asks, peeling the label off of the cheap beer that she’s ordered.  It tastes like piss, but she’s not really here for the alcohol.  It’s the conversation that interests her.

His expression closes and Myka wonders if she’s overstepped the barrier of friendship. She watches him as he composes himself, taking in how his jaw clenches and how his Adam’s Apple bobs as he swallows.  He seems almost younger than Claudia like this, and Myka shifts uncomfortably.

“All the time,” Steve says quietly.  “I think you’re the same way.”

Myka nods.  She knows better than to lie to Steve, at least not about important things.  No, it is easier to simply tell him the truth.  “It’s killing me that she’s gone.”

Steve raises his beer and they clink the bottles together.  Myka takes a sip and stares up at the neon light advertising the usual bar staples.  The light seems to blur in her vision, but Myka dies not disappear.  Steve’s hand is on her forearm and Myka bites her lip and looks away.  She’s not embarrassed that she has such a tentative grasp on this time. 

“Thank you,” she says, her voice low, just loud enough to be hold over the quiet jazz that’s playing on the bar’s sound system. 

“For what?” Steve asks.

Myka shrugs.  “For never judging.”

When they return to South Dakota, Myka starts to look for Helena everywhere. She knows better than to expect to see Helena in passing on the street as they go for groceries on Leena’s behest. 

No, the looking is as irrational as Myka’s knowledge that everything is going to be alright.  It cannot be alright because there is a fold in time.  The layers are blended on top of each other and Artie is growing more and more paranoid with every passing day. 

She dreams of fire on the night when she spends too much time in the warehouse.  She dreams of fire and the world exploding in color all around her.  It feels wrong, artificial, like what Sykes had wanted to do had actually happened. 

Myka can see Helena’s face so clearly in that moment, her body slowly dissolving into nothingness.  She knows that Pete and Artie were right beside her, but she cannot see anything but the place where Helena had once stood, her expression full of everything that they had yet to say to each other.

Myka wakes up with her fists balled around handfuls of her pillow those nights, tears streaming freely down her face. 

There has to be a solution.  Helena would not vanish without reason.

It is still dark outside, but while she is grounded in the present, Myka allows herself to fully wake up.  She pulls the stack of research that she’s been doing for Artie towards her, and begins her day anew.

 

notes: Until 4.5 airs this will be the last installment.  It will be back!


	30. Myka is 41, Helena is 45

Doctor Calder’s face is drawn and worried as she presses her fingers to Myka’s wrist and slowly counts out her pulse.  She’s displaced, violently this time, across time and space.  There is no starting and stopping any more.  The transitions are getting rougher.  Myka swallows as the good doctor counts down slowly to judgment.

This can only be bad news. 

“I’m going to up your dose,” Doctor Calder says with a drawn out sigh.  She looks world-weary as she makes a note on Myka’s chart.  “You have to try and not leave this timeline, Myka.”

Myka hangs her head and stares at her hands.  They don’t look solid at all now.  They’re shaking, looking like she’s eighty rather than only forty-one.  It takes so much out of her to even breathe.

(And she knows that this isn’t the end.  The end comes later, it always comes later.  She’s known it for years now and she still finds herself crossing out the days on the calendar, every tick of a clock another second closer to doomsday.)

“I can’t help it,” Myka protests, and Helena runs a hand through her hair, the pin at her lapel glinting brightly in the bright sunlight that streams through the curtains.  “I’ve never been able to.”

Doctor Calder just shakes her head.  “I know, Myka, but you’re about to have a child, you can’t keep doing this.  It cannot be good for the baby.”

Myka doesn’t tell her that the child will have the same problem, the same displacement and they will be no closer to solving it by the time she finally does die.  They’re both risking so much; a child this late in her life is already risk.  She ticks off the names of the other diseases and disorders, the ones they can test for.  The fact she hasn’t miscarried again is a miracle.  This child is a gift from somewhere, that much is for sure. 

She doesn’t meet Doctor Calder’s eyes as the doctor slowly writes out the series of prescriptions, drugs that they know Myka can take while pregnant.  She doesn’t even dare look at Helena who somehow always knows when Myka isn’t being truthful, when she’s avoiding the truth.

She’d been back to sometime in her own childhood.  She couldn’t have been much more than five, pressing her fingers to her own stomach, curly hair pointing every which way as her eyes are wide.  “I’m going to have a baby?”  Myka hadn’t remembered the childish glee in her voice when she’d said it.  She hadn’t remembered a lot of things about that trip, and the pure joy in her own eyes at the realization that she could do something so mundane as have a child…

Myka shakes her head and reaches for Helena’s hand.  Helena couldn’t have the child.  Christina is a wound that will never heal.  Myka’s met Christina, she can understand why.  Helena will grieve forever, as she will when Myka goes too.

It’s the sort of thing that feels far more morbid than it really is.

And poor Evelynn is going to have to stomach such a loss when she finally grows enough to understand it.  It’s like autism, it manifests as a child starts to reach certain milestones.

Helena’s fingers are warm in Myka’s hand and she looks up, her expression stern.  “I’m going to be okay,” Myka lies.

(This is the start of the end. The inevitable.)

“Myka, you’ve always been rubbish at lying,” Helena replies.  Her voice sounds like she’s speaking in a vacuum and Myka bites her lip.  She isn’t thinking about all that has happened to them.  The world ending and being reborn again and again.  The death and the suffering.  Artie - her man with glasses and a bad temper - he’s gone now.  Claudia’s replaced Mrs. Frederic.  Things are so different.

They’ve escaped that place - they’re not evil, dead or insane; although all three points are debatable.  This is Wyoming and it’s all so terribly like Anne of Green Gables that Myka wants to cry. 

“I can’t…” Myka begins, her fingers pressing against her stomach and sighing. 

When Doctor Calder leaves them to return to her own heart-wrenching emptiness that she likes to call a home, Helena says something that will echo in Myka’s ears forever.

“Sometimes, I think you are my curse.  My penance for all that I did to save Christina.  You, a being that moves though time so effortlessly; how could I be such a fool to fall in love with you when I know time will snatch you from me at a moment’s notice?”

“I—”  There is no answer.  There never is.  Myka swallows and can’t say anything.  She’ll leave Helena long before Helena herself goes.  That is how this works.  “I love you,” she says at last.

Helena smiles weakly at her.  She’s the one who makes all the decisions these days - in more ways than one.  “I know,” she replies and her eyes are sad.  “And I love you.”

“Why can’t it be easy?” Myka laments, sitting down heavily into a chair, fingers splayed out across her stomach. 

“Because that isn’t how we’re built,” Helena replies.

And Myka knows that Helena Wells is the wisest woman she’s ever met.


	31. Myka is 31

There is death everywhere, and the world is descending into chaos.  Myka stands with Pete, holding onto his hand, desperate and sore afraid.  She doesn’t know what to do, and they’re racing against more than against time.  There’s so much at stake and they can’t even figure out where they should be going or what they should be doing.  Her reality is blurred and shaking, and Pete’s got her by the hand, squeezing as tightly as she dares. 

Leena is dead.

Leena is dead and Myka’s grip on the present is tenuous and shaking. 

Artie has done something.  Myka’s sure of it and she’s sure that Helena knew as well. There’s time that’s different.  It’s strange and changed. She can feel it aching and incorrect in her bones.

And Artie?  Artie’s spiraling out of control.

They should have recognized the signs far before now.  They should have recognized a lot of things that they’ve willfully ignored up to this point in time.  The ghost of Brother Adrian is nothing more than Artie himself, it has to be.

Leena is dead.

Myka’s struggling to keep herself together as they dash back towards France and a solution that they’re not sure they can find.  She eats more of Doctor Calder’s pills than she thinks is necessarily safe, but she can’t help herself.

The world is dissolving into chaos and she’s winking in and out of time.

They don’t have any time anymore.

Seventeen hours and half the world is going to start dying.

Myka tries not to think of Helena.  Helena who would know what this is and would know how to fix it.  Warehouse 12 was still in Europe, they would know the connections of Warehouse Eight, and the shared history of Europe. 

Helena is all alone, somewhere in the world, watching this crisis unfold on television and over the radio.  She would recognize the signs, Myka thinks, and she would know what to do.

The future feels uncertain for the first time in Myka’s life, and she can’t keep herself grounded as the plane speeds them back to France and the answers that they seek.  Her eyes flutter shut and she falls backwards into sleep.  The kind that is best reserved for the dead, exhausted and dreamless.  These are the nights that Myka dreads most of all, because it is when she sleeps like this that she is truly alone.

It goes out with a whimper, rather than a bang.  It always does.  Snagged, bagged, and tagged; they’ve found the one artifact that puts broken thinks like Humpty Dumpty back together again.  They lost a friend that day, down in the maze of catacombs under Paris.  Dead in his own tomb, it is oddly fitting, Myka thinks.

All she can think of is how desperately she wants to tell Helena that she’s fixed this.  She’s solved the puzzled and saved the day all on her own.  Well, Pete helped.

He looks at her when they get on the plane, “Do you think that they’ll bronze Artie?”

Myka isn’t sure.  She doesn’t even dare think about it.  Her family is imploding around her, but she knows that it does get better.  She’s seen it.  It has to be true.

That house that looks like Prince Edward Island where Anne of Green Gables lived.  It is her future.  She’s just got to stumble towards that point, she knows this.

And it terrifies her.

“I don’t know,” she replies sadly. 

Once, Pete said that everyone that goes into the warehouse is crazy, dead, or evil.  There’s no category for missing, clearly still alive.  There’s no category for lost in time.

They don’t fit into the status quo, the boxes that have been established since the days of Alexander the Great.  They’re here, in the present, when the future is constantly changing and yet static.

“Will they bronze you for knowing what Artie did and not saying anything,” Pete wonders later, somewhere over the Atlantic.

Myka purses her lips and shakes her head.  “They’d have to bronze Helena again too.  Helena knew.  I couldn’t say anything.”

“I know, I know,” Pete says, but his eyes are hard and closed off.  “Think we could remake the world to save Leena?”

She thinks to the future and the silence of the room of statues in the Bronze Sector. She’s been all over this timeline, and the light of Leena winks out here, in this moment. 

“No.”


	32. Myka is 45

Doctor Calder has no answers for Myka this time. According to the latest battery of tests, Myka’s blood is thin and her cells unmoving under the microscope’s lens that’s displayed on the computer screen before her. “This isn’t good, Myka,” Doctor Calder explains. She moves the mouse to enlarge the edge of one of the cells and taps her pen against the monitor to direct Myka’s attention, focused somewhere between her fingernails and the small scar from a childhood fall just below her wrist bone. Myka looks up and surveys the red-pink blob, not comprehending.

Softening, Doctor Calder begins to speak. “This fraying at the edges of your cells, see how they look ragged there? That’s not a good sign. While there’s not much to go on, given the uniqueness of your condition, I think that it means that we’re seeing the beginning of a mutation not unlike a cancer in your cells. It means that your disorder has turned inwards. It’s why you don’t jump anymore.” Her voice is measured and as deliberately kind as it’s ever been during their time together. It’s one of the few strings that Claudia was able to pull when she took over the Warehouse from Mrs. Frederic and finally let the severe woman wink from existence.

“A cancer?”

“It’s a poor analogy.” Doctor Calder waves a dismissive hand. “I should have phrased it better. It just means that your cells are eating your mutation, I think.”

Myka hasn’t displaced since Evelynn was born. She knows she will fall back in time once more before she dies, to deliver a message of encouragement to herself. After that it will be this slow, steady decline. It will be Helena’s worried look sand Evelynn not understanding what is happening. It will be the inevitable pull, a staccato march, full of fits and starts, towards her inevitable death by the hand of this cancer-like doom.

“I’m going to jump once more.” It feels like she says it in confidence. Myka never talks about her jumps back to the past or to the future other than in the most abstract terms possible. “To give myself a talking to.”

She’s met with an amused grin. Doctor Calder has known her a long time. “I imagine it was about Helena?”

“Who else would I ever need a talking to about?”

“I worry about you, Myka.” Doctor Calder’s hand is warm on Myka’s leg. “You’re like a ghost these days, all that’s left of you seems to be this great love you have for Helena and Evelynn.”

“There’s more to me than that,” Myka answers. It is a lie. She’s seen the end and she knows that there is very little left to say. She’s doomed to waste away into nothing, the same as in all of her nightmares.

When she goes home that night, her mouth is clamped shut and she feels like dying before her time. Evelynn is out in the yard, shrieking with glee as she chases a butterfly. Helena is watching from the porch steps, a mug of tea cradled to her chest.

“It isn’t good news.” Helena doesn’t look at Myka. Since this began, she’s been able to pick up on Myka’s body language without looking. She senses, rather than sees things. Perhaps it was all the time she spent trapped within her head that has made her like this, another unforeseen circumstance of them remaking the world around them.

“No,” Myka answers.

There are no other words to say. Tears prick at the corner of her eyes and the mug falls to the ground and shatters. Helena is barefoot, but her arms are strong and protective as she draws Myka in, holding her close and keeping her grounded.

(Myka took two pills before she left Doctor Calder’s office and another two before she got out of the car upon arriving home. She will not displace today, but her body feels the urge acutely. To slip from this conversation away to face herself or Helena, a child or a teenager, and not have to admit the truth.)

She is dying.

Her mutation has finally done her in.


	33. Myka is 31 and 11

In the end, they can’t remake the world. The consequences are such that they never could and Myka is alone.

The vast darkness of the badlands at night is enough to swallow her whole. Myka stands out in the yard. Leena is dead. There’s no comforting presence waiting for them when they return for the evening anymore. There’s no smells of dinner cooking and no warmth in the bed and breakfast anymore. Claudia hates it and makes it clear that she hates it, sulking and refusing to help Steve or Pete at least try and put together dinner.

Myka doesn’t cook.

She learned a long time ago that attempting to do anything that required a prolonged investment of time was a foolish idea. She’ll drift off across time, and come back to her mother annoyed that dinner is burned and that Myka doesn’t have better control.

Now she stands in the middle of a windswept wasteland and thinks about the coming days. They’ve been summoned: the threat this time is not from outside, but rather from within their own ranks. The Regents want answers, and Myka isn’t sure that anything will save Artie from being bronzed.

And Helena?

No one knows where she is.

Even in slipping through time, lurching back and forward across their shared time together, Myka has never seen this time. She doesn’t know where Helena is, she doesn’t even know if, in remaking the world, Artie might have destroyed the future with she saw for herself and Helena. The thought is like a gunshot, it fells her to her knees on the hard, dry earth.

The wind has picked up, above the stars are obscured by clouds blacker than the night around them.

Her phone trills a warning.

Severe weather alert. Tornado Warning.

Myka gets to her feet and hurries inside.

Tomorrow they will go pick up the pieces of their lives and drive away from Univille, south into Wyoming. They will sit before the Regents in some nondescript building in a facility that shouldn’t exist and they will have to try and make the case that Artie, in using an artifact with such consequences did the right thing.

Not to save Helena, for that was all that Myka ever cared about, but to save the world.

Myka steps inside, and falls back through time.

She is eleven.

“I’m like the crypt keeper,” she jokes, staring down at herself. “And super tall.”

“Sorry to disappoint.” Myka takes the blanket offered and pulls it around herself. On the television behind them, Bill Clinton is making a speech. Myka reads it and her face pales. “What he’s saying,” she says fiercely to the little girl with her curls in braids next to her. “What he’s saying, you can’t ever believe that.”

Her younger self stares at the television. “Don’t ask, don’t tell?”

“Someday,” Myka says. “You’ll understand why.”

They don’t say anything else. Myka reads the paper and the girl does homework. She’s practicing French. She’s not very good yet.

And when Myka falls back and lands on Claudia’s bed, the windows are rattling and the storm is raging. Everyone is downstairs in the basement.

Hiding away from the rage of the storm that was still yet to come.

 


	34. Myka is 32

They don’t bronze Artie. If Myka is honest with herself, she didn’t think that they would. There was never the intent there, it was all done with good intentions. And, despite everything, she likes to think that the Regents learned their lesson when they bronzed Helena.

Months stretch on.

The days seem to blur together, an endless monotony punctuated with brief periods of action and violence so intense that they feel as though they’re about to swallow Myka whole. She celebrates a birthday on one of them, Pete stops by a cupcake shop and they buy two. Chocolate for him, lemon for her; the taste is tart on her tongue, the black flecks of vanilla bean in the frosting fill her vision and threaten to consume her.

She hasn’t heard from Helena.

Myka has spent the three decades of her life with this woman, and she can safely say that this is the longest she’s ever gone without her. She doesn’t displace, she stays put in the present and feels languid; her body becoming complacent with the awful truth of her life now.

“Mykes,” Pete says. He has a napkin clutched in his hand and makes a pass at her nose. Myka backs away, scowling, and snatches the napkin away. There’s frosting on her face.

“You could have just said,” Myka grumbles.

He laughs and shakes his head. She leans against him. He’s warm and the days are growing colder. “Think we’ll find the trophy soon?” Myka muses.

“There’s only a few more places left to check.”

“Mn.” Myka crumples up her cupcake wrapper and the napkin and gets to her feet, intent on the trash can a little ways away.

Her phone is ringing. It’s probably her mother or her sister. Her father won’t call. Myka doesn’t want to talk to any of them. She pulls her phone out and glances down at the caller ID, not recognizing the number.

“Who do I know in Minnesota?” she mutters, sliding her finger over the screen to answer. “Hello?”

The pause feels like it goes on forever. Myka’s heart beats once, twice, three times and she knows, she just  _knows_  who it is without the caller even having to speak. And when she does, Myka’s heart feels like it’s racing faster than it has in years. “Happy Birthday, Myka.”

“Helena…” She says it like a sigh, a breath of fresh air and longing all at once. “You—you called! They’re letting you call!” She shouldn’t sound so overjoyed.

“I’ve always been able to call,” Helena lets loose a quiet sigh. “I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. There’s trouble here now, I need your help.” She rattles off an explanation that Myka barely hears. There is a ringing in her ears, the shock of it all. There’s no guarantee that Helena even wants her there, or wants her at all. The future isn’t set in stone. Maybe all that Myka has seen has been a lie.

Her heart is crumbling when she makes her promises. Pete can get Steve out here to handle this case, easy.

“What is it,” Pete has chocolate on the corner of his mouth and he’s staring at her like she’s about to disappear. Myka fumbles in her pockets, pills, pills, pills, feeling the familiar hum take over her body. She’s going to disappear – she’s going to—


	35. Myka is 32, Helena is 80

Myka wakes up in the Warehouse. She feels it humming around her and the cold sets in quick. It’s settling into her bones, seeping there and lingering, cold, harsh. She pushes herself to her feet and there’s an imprint of her body on the floor. She’s shivering.

_When am I?_

There is no way of telling: the warehouse is unchanging. Myka scans the stacks and doesn’t see anything that looks familiar or new. This could be tomorrow, or three weeks ago.

It is so cold.

A blanket settles over her shoulders and Myka lets out a startled yelp.

“This is it,” a woman with stark white hair and eyes that Myka would recognize anywhere says. “This is your last trip forward.”

Myka tugs the blanket around her shoulders, sinking into its warmth before she turns to face the wizened woman before her. “Helena…”

Warm brow eyes meet her own, the crow’s feet at the corners are deep and crinkled, traced with years of warmth. “It is… good to see you, Myka.”

“When am I?”

“Far, far into my future, darling.” Helena’s left hand bears a ring. Her fingers feel like sandpaper on Myka’s cheek as they caress her skin. “I’ve missed you so.”

It is a slip-up that Myka does not comment on. She’s sure she knows the truth then. She’s dead and buried, killed by artifact of her mutation, and still Helena remains.

“When I was little, I displaced here a lot,” Myka confesses. “Now, I think it’s the last place I want to see.”

“Is it worse than Chicago?” Helena asks mildly.

“That was an  _adventure,_  Helena.” Myka replies. “This, this just feels like a bad memory.”

“Come up to the office, I’ll make us some tea.”

No one else is around. Myka doesn’t even know who would work at the Warehouse anymore. The place looks unchanged, perhaps with a few more contraptions lying around that she doesn’t recognize, and a computer that looks both ancient and superior in every way to anything she’s ever seen. Helena sets the kettle on a hotplate and passes her a pair of scrub pants and a shirt. Myka pulls them on obligingly, but keeps the blanket. Even with the heating system being state of the art (and possibly a misused artifact) it’s still bitterly cold inside.

“You’ve displaced on your birthday, I’m sorry.” She holds out the cup of tea she’s prepared and Myka takes it. “Happy birthday.”

“Thanks,” Myka says. “I displaced because you called me, actually.”

“Ah, that nasty business.” Helena shakes her head. “I suppose that you’ll understand that in time.”

Myka wants to understand it now. She sets the tea aside, it’s too hot to drink, even in this cold. “You disappeared, after—after we proved what Artie did. Helena, you  _died_  and then you disappeared. It’s been months since I’ve spoken to you.”

“And I will die again. In time. I keep escaping it, you know, sometimes it feels as though I’m missing out.” Helena sips her tea. “Emily Lake weighed heavily on my mind then. Even if I was not her, there was some solace I could draw in not remembering who I was.”

“In not remembering Christina, you mean.”

“There’s another little girl then, and another one now, one supposes.”

“I met her once. When I was just a girl.” She looks down at her hands. “She is the future, isn’t she?”

“She is a future. There are many, Myka. I have spent my whole life looking for answers to questions I didn’t know how to ask. I want you to look at this and put that memory of yours to work.” Helena eases herself to her feet with some difficulty and crosses to a drawer. She produces a file folder. She hands it to Myka with shaking hands.

“What is it?” Myka asks.

“It is your future.”

And Myka knows. She knows that she is dead in this time and has been dead a long while. She closes her eyes and doesn’t open the folder. “I can’t change things.”

Helena’s hand shoots out and wraps, claw-like, around her wrist. “Myka you must. Please. Of all my accomplishments in my life, this is the most important. This will save you. It will save—” she cuts herself off.

“She has it too?” Myka cannot bear the thought. “I die of this.” That she’s always known, but to pass it on, to give it to another human… That’s awful. No one deserves this life.

“Far before your time.” Helena closes her eyes. “It takes her when she’s fifteen. Please, Myka,  _take it._ ”

Myka opens the file and starts to read.

Myka wakes up in the Warehouse. She feels it humming around her and the cold sets in quick. It’s settling into her bones, seeping there and lingering, cold, harsh. She pushes herself to her feet and there’s an imprint of her body on the floor. She’s shivering.

_When am I?_

There is no way of telling: the warehouse is unchanging. Myka scans the stacks and doesn’t see anything that looks familiar or new. This could be tomorrow, or three weeks ago.

It is so cold.

A blanket settles over her shoulders and Myka lets out a startled yelp.

“This is it,” a woman with stark white hair and eyes that Myka would recognize anywhere says. “This is your last trip forward.”

Myka tugs the blanket around her shoulders, sinking into its warmth before she turns to face the wizened woman before her. “Helena…”

Warm brow eyes meet her own, the crow’s feet at the corners are deep and crinkled, traced with years of warmth. “It is… good to see you, Myka.”

“When am I?”

“Far, far into my future, darling.” Helena’s left hand bears a ring. Her fingers feel like sandpaper on Myka’s cheek as they caress her skin. “I’ve missed you so.”

It is a slip-up that Myka does not comment on. She’s sure she knows the truth then. She’s dead and buried, killed by artifact of her mutation, and still Helena remains.

“When I was little, I displaced here a lot,” Myka confesses. “Now, I think it’s the last place I want to see.”

“Is it worse than Chicago?” Helena asks mildly.

“That was an  _adventure,_  Helena.” Myka replies. “This, this just feels like a bad memory.”

“Come up to the office, I’ll make us some tea.”

No one else is around. Myka doesn’t even know who would work at the Warehouse anymore. The place looks unchanged, perhaps with a few more contraptions lying around that she doesn’t recognize, and a computer that looks both ancient and superior in every way to anything she’s ever seen. Helena sets the kettle on a hotplate and passes her a pair of scrub pants and a shirt. Myka pulls them on obligingly, but keeps the blanket. Even with the heating system being state of the art (and possibly a misused artifact) it’s still bitterly cold inside.

“You’ve displaced on your birthday, I’m sorry.” She holds out the cup of tea she’s prepared and Myka takes it. “Happy birthday.”

“Thanks,” Myka says. “I displaced because you called me, actually.”

“Ah, that nasty business.” Helena shakes her head. “I suppose that you’ll understand that in time.”

Myka wants to understand it now. She sets the tea aside, it’s too hot to drink, even in this cold. “You disappeared, after—after we proved what Artie did. Helena, you  _died_  and then you disappeared. It’s been months since I’ve spoken to you.”

“And I will die again. In time. I keep escaping it, you know, sometimes it feels as though I’m missing out.” Helena sips her tea. “Emily Lake weighed heavily on my mind then. Even if I was not her, there was some solace I could draw in not remembering who I was.”

“In not remembering Christina, you mean.”

“There’s another little girl then, and another one now, one supposes.”

“I met her once. When I was just a girl.” She looks down at her hands. “She is the future, isn’t she?”

“She is a future. There are many, Myka. I have spent my whole life looking for answers to questions I didn’t know how to ask. I want you to look at this and put that memory of yours to work.” Helena eases herself to her feet with some difficulty and crosses to a drawer. She produces a file folder. She hands it to Myka with shaking hands.

“What is it?” Myka asks.

“It is your future.”

And Myka knows. She knows that she is dead in this time and has been dead a long while. She closes her eyes and doesn’t open the folder. “I can’t change things.”

Helena’s hand shoots out and wraps, claw-like, around her wrist. “Myka you must. Please. Of all my accomplishments in my life, this is the most important. This will save you. It will save—” she cuts herself off.

“She has it too?” Myka cannot bear the thought. “I die of this.” That she’s always known, but to pass it on, to give it to another human… That’s awful. No one deserves this life.

“Far before your time.” Helena closes her eyes. “It takes her when she’s fifteen. Please, Myka,  _take it._ ”

Myka opens the file and starts to read.


	36. Myka is 32

Helena is in a small town far away from anything that could be considered odd or unusual. Nothing smells like fudge, nothing smells like anything other than the cold air of the coming autumn. Myka stands on her doorstep and tries to swallow back her fears. Helena has given her a chance. She just had it put it into motion and take advantage of it. Helena has given her life.

And Myka has to keep it a secret until the time is right.

In her present, Helena is gone from her life, and now she’s stumbling back into it.

“You’re here,” she says, and pulls Myka inside the house. It smells clean inside, almost sterile. There’s no sign of anything anywhere that could give the place a personality. Helena is hiding again.

Helena is kissing her. Her grip on Myka’s shoulders is so tight that Myka is sure there will be bruises in the morning.

There is a case to solve, there are people to save, but right now, in this moment, Helena is all that matters.

It is only later, when Myka is sated and tangled in sweat damp sheets that she asks Helena why. Why she ran and why she’s hiding from who she is.

“Why did you leave?”

“The Regents. They wanted to see how the business with Arthur would play out, and I couldn’t be a part of it. Helena’s fingers rest on Myka’s collarbone. “With their number so depleted by Walter Sykes, they offered me a place with them.”

“Will you take it?” Myka asks.

Helena hums. “The warehouse has hurt me far more than it’s helped me, Myka. I cannot escape those memories no matter how hard I try. They were the ones who decided to bronze me, after all.”

“So you’re what, thinking about it?” Myka asks.

She nods. “I needed time to get myself back. Emily Lake…what they did to me, it isn’t the sort of thing one can just throw off. I’ve had to work to unlearn Emily. That’s why I’m here, working in forensics. Remembering the science I loved so much.” Helena shakes her head, her lips preplacing her fingers on Myka’s collarbone. “I cannot believe they made me an English teacher.”

“With a cat.”

“The devil’s creatures, them.” Helena sits up and stretches. “I suppose you’ll want to get started on the case?”

Myka reaches out then, and takes Helena’s hand. “It can wait a little longer. The artifact will still be there in tomorrow’s light.”

When they part, three days and two artifacts neutralized later, Myka doesn’t know when she’ll see Helena again. She knows that it will be soon. “You should do it,” she says as Helena holds her close. “Take them up on the offer, let them allow you to return to the Warehouse – home.”

“Myka if I take up that mantle everything changes.”

Myka regards Helena for a long time. “I think,” she says with some trepidation, that you’ve already changed the world, now it’s time to live in it again.”

“We’ll see, darling,” Helena answers, “We’ll see.”


	37. Myka is 32

Pete is in the office, half-buried in some old manga he found in the archives. He’s read the notes, for once, and there’s nothing particularly untoward about these comics if he reads them with goggles and gloves. Claudia is watching him warily. Steve is well, Steve, and is watching Claudia with that dazzled, confused look on his face that he gets when things aren’t looking quite right and he’s afraid of all that he feels.

Myka knows that look well; she’s seen it written across her own face, across decades. Steve is a lot like her, just in different ways. His mutation, at least, is understandable. Myka’s is killing her slowly.

She reaches into her pocket and pulls out her keys. On a keychain, she keeps a small metal pill bottle. She pulls it open and takes a pill, dry swallowing with some difficulty.

“Mykes, you gotta read this.” Pete holds up the comic and Myka is almost blinded by the flash of light it emits. “Or, you gotta get some goggles on your face and then read this.”

“Maybe later,” she says. She’s feeling on edge, distracted. She’s full of the unease of something momentous about to happen, and she can’t articulate what it will be. She takes up the clipboard, discarded on the corner of Artie’s desk, and scans its contents. “Where is Artie?”

“Said he had to go collect something from town,” Claudia doesn’t look up from the line of code she’s written. “Didn’t say what. Hope it’s not another of Farnsworth’s crazy movie cameras.”

Pete’s comic sparks again. They all jump.

“That was a disaster.” Myka agrees.

“Movie cameras?” Steve frowns.

“Oh man, Jinksy, I got a story for you.” Claudia saves and powers down her workstation before getting to her feet. She grabs Steve’s hand and pulls him towards the door. “But it needs a few visual aids.”

“Don’t you dare turn it on!” Myka after her.

“Yes, Ma!” Claudia calls and Myka casts a nervous glance over at the neutralizer levels indicated in the corner.

Pete puts his comics back in their static bag. “She wouldn’t.”

“Maybe you should go keep an eye on them?”

“Nah, they’ll be fine.”

There’s a bang from the Warehouse floor and Pete’s on his feet in seconds, grabbing a handful of static bags and sprinting out the door before Myka can take so much as a step toward the door. She exhales, listening to the murmur of voices disappear into an almost oppressive silence. It weighs on her, pressing down as she turns her attention back to the clipboard in her hands.

“Agent Bering.”

She just about jumps out of her skin.

Mrs. Frederic is standing just out of her field of vision, a ghost in the great machine that is the Warehouse. “You scared me,” Myka says. Her voice is shaking. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Frederic?”

She’s met with a wan smile and a dip of the woman’s head. Her glasses are fogged. It’s the middle of winter. Maybe she is governed by the rules of men and the natural universe after all, but somehow, Myka doesn’t think so.

“I need your assistance on a project.” Mrs. Frederic clasps her hands before her. “We’ve spoken many times about this, but I think now, as we’ve exhausted the possibilities of anything else, that this is the best course of action.”

Something feels like it’s breaking loose in Myka’s head. Rattling, the precursor to a displacement, only she is more grounded than she’s ever been. She sets her clipboard down. “What is it?”

“I’ve sent Arthur—” There is a moment then, when the realization dawns on Myka and she turns, heading almost blindly towards the umbilicus.

“You’re giving her back? The Regents—They’re giving her back?”

Mrs. Frederic shakes her head. “Not the regents, never them. This is what the Warehouse desires, so this is what the Warehouse gets. She made it possible, in her own way, for all this to continue. It is the least I can do. What Arthur did afterward, and how easily she saw through the lie of it, that is what has won her the respect of the Regents.”

Myka doesn’t know what to say. She knows all this and knows that Mrs. Frederic knows she knows. She sits down, heavily.

“I’m going to marry her one day.”

“Of that I have no doubt.”

“Fraternization is against Warehouse policy.”

It earns Myka a derisive snort. “Many things, Agent Bering, that happen here are against the official policy. She is to be a Regent.”

There’s another bang from the Warehouse floor, followed by a shriek.

“I should check on that.”

“Agent Bering, you’re needed at the front door.” Myka looks up. Mrs. Frederic is gone. The light over the breach door in the umbilicus is flashing a warning red, before it fades to green as the code is properly entered.

Myka gets to her feet and crosses to the door. She pulls it open, not caring if the air is cold and sterile. Helena is there, inputting a second code, changing from the default of her ID badge while Artie supervises. An eye of Horrus gleams at her lapel. Artie looks up, and steps back. Helena smiles.

“Hello, Myka.”

And the future is restarting.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on tumblr as something of a secret story. It works well if you're familiar with at least the basic principles of The Time Traveler's Wife, as I am ripping off pretty much all of it. Figured I'd put this up where more people could see it.


End file.
